Treatment adherence

Treatment adherence is how closely a person follows a treatment as it was planned, such as taking a medication regularly or attending therapy sessions.

This term is specific to research interpretation and is defined on AnxietyResearch. Shrinktionary, the network's language layer, doesn't currently carry a canonical entry for it.

A treatment can only work if it's actually used. Adherence covers taking the right dose at the right time, attending sessions, and continuing for the planned length. Non-adherence is common and has many causes, including side effects, cost, feeling better and stopping early, and simply forgetting.

Adherence shapes both research and real-world results. In trials, low adherence can make an effective treatment look weak. In daily life, a treatment that works in theory does nothing if a person can't stay on it. This is one reason real-world results often fall short of trial results.

An SSRI may need four to six weeks to take effect. A person who stops after two weeks because they feel no benefit yet has low adherence, and they may never learn whether the medication would have helped.

When a treatment underperforms in practice, poor adherence is a common reason, separate from whether the treatment works. Trials that use an intention-to-treat analysis handle non-adherence more honestly than trials that count only the people who completed treatment.