Patterns of prescription of antihypertensive medications in Poland: a one-year assessment of initiation and persistence of therapy in a nationwide population cohort
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: This study assessed the prescribing patterns and treatment persistence of antihypertensive medications over a 12-month period in a nationwide cohort from Poland. METHODS: We examined data on all 141 668 patients in Poland who received their first hypertension prescription in January 2021, sourced from the e-Health Centre database encompassing all filled prescriptions. Treatment persistence over the first 12 months was assessed as a measure of long-term adherence. We assessed the degree of persistence to therapy as the percentage of patients having a supply of the drug for each consecutive month until the end of follow-up. RESULTS: Antihypertensive therapy was started with a monotherapy in 57% of cases; 23% (21% of women and 25% of men; P < 0.001) started with a two-drug antihypertensive combination and 13% (11% of women, 17% of men; P < 0.001) with a single-pill combinations (SPCs). Only 33% of patients (29% of women, 36% of men; P < 0.001) received drug classes combinations endorsed by guidelines. Treatment persistence after 1 year exhibited significant age-related disparities - persisting in 17-53% among younger and middle-aged individuals, and 59-87% among older patients. Initiation with an SPC was associated with higher 1-year persistence. Among patients still on antihypertensive therapy at 12 months, 30% were on monotherapy, 27% on two drugs, and 43% on three or more agents. CONCLUSION: In Poland, monotherapy is the predominant first line treatment of hypertension. A substantial proportion of younger and middle-aged patients discontinue therapy within the first year. The use of SPCs at initiation is associated with an improved long-term persistence.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".