Adherence to cardiovascular medications in the South Asian population: A systematic review of current evidence and future directions

AIM: To review methods of assessing adherence and strategies to improve adherence to cardiovascular disease (CVD) medications, among South Asian CVD patients. METHODS: We conducted a systematic review of English language studies that examined CVD medication adherence in South Asian populations from 1966 to April 1, 2015 in SCOPUS and PubMed. Working in duplicate, we identified 61 studies. After exclusions, 26 studies were selected for full text review. Of these, 17 studies were included in the final review. We abstracted data on several factors including study design, study population, method of assessing adherence and adherence rate. RESULTS: These studies were conducted in India (n = 11), Pakistan (n = 3), Bangladesh (n = 1), Nepal (n = 1) and Sri…