In the subgroup of patients with bad adherence at baseline, involuntary first admission and quitting cannabis use during follow up were associated with improved adherence.
Table 4 shows that 70.0% (28/40) of patients with 'always bad' adherence had involuntary admission at baseline, as did 95.7% (22/23) of the patients with adherence that 'improved from bad to good' during the study.
There was no significant difference between adherence groups in these variables, except for a higher consumption of alcohol in the bad adherence subgroup (Table 2).
In our study, 57.1% of the FEP patients had involuntary first admission to the psychiatric unit and all of these patients had bad adherence upon admission.
Of the patients with bad adherence at 8 years, 44.4% (20/45) continued to use cannabis at 8 years, while only 12.8% (6/47) of patients with good adherence continued using cannabis (Table 3).
At first hospitalization, 74.4% of our study sample had bad adherence, which is consistent with previous reports of FEP patients [ 1].
Adherence to treatment is essential and bad adherence, or ABZ withdrawal because of side-effects, have been shown to be crucial for lesion recurrence in patients with residual lesions after liver transplantation [ 20].
Adherence was bad for 74.4% (73/98) of patients and good for 25.5% (25/98) of patients at baseline, with few significant differences in characteristics between the good and bad adherence groups, except for family history of psychosis (Table 2).
The majority (20/27, 74%) of patients who continued to use cannabis over the 8-year follow-up period had consistently bad adherence, whereas only 17% (4/23) of the patients who stopped using cannabis were in the always bad adherence group.
Compared with the bad adherence group, a significantly lower proportion of patients with good adherence at 8 years had alcohol consumption (p = 0.019), cannabis use (p < 0.001), or use of other drugs (p < 0.001).
