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Texts help patients get the message on antidepressants

Patients suffering from depression could be sent texts to ensure they take their medication regularly as part of an award-winning approach to improve poor compliance with antidepressants.

Forty per cent of depressed patients stop treatment after only a month, according to the World Health Organisation, and the average rate of people taking the correct dose at the right time is only 53 per cent.

Now a new method of tackling the problem could also radically change the way drug companies develop antidepressants.

The idea has been researched by Mathieu Michalet - a Master in Bioscience Enterprise student at Cambridge University - spurred by conversations as a teenager with his father, a family doctor in France.

He said: "My father would always say how difficult it was to convince patients to take medication. There is stigma in people's minds attached to depression. They may not even accept the diagnosis, and a patient's family may not understand or be sympathetic. All this can lead to people not taking their medicine."

Michalet's work, developed with Pope Woodhead and Associates, a consulting company based in St Ives, Cambridgeshire, has won the inaugural RSA Dissertation Award at the Institute of Biotechnology at Cambridge University.

His proposals include regular texting, or even initial calls from a nurse, designed to build a close patient relationship, alongside more patient choice about the degree of family involvement and the communication tools used to receive information and support. Relatives could also receive email or text reminders.

To be successful, the programme would have to be carried out on a large scale and crucially, drug companies would offer it in conjunction with their antidepressant drug. Michalet says the compliance regime should be developed early on by the pharmaceutical company, along with its drug risk management programme, in order to save costs and maximise benefits. But family doctors would mainly stay the point of contact. Among patients he interviewed, Michalet found clear lack of trust in pharma companies.

Fear of side-effects, lack of understanding of the treatment process, and the nature of depression itself, can lead to people not taking their prescription. Michalet's aim was to find a compromise between expensive one-to-one interventions and simple but often ineffective educational leaflets.

Tarquin Bennett-Coles of RSA, the global life sciences recruitment specialist, said: "With more generic prescribing and increasing emphasis on keeping costs down, patient compliance is seen as a key way of maximising potential returns on products with a long development span, before patent expiry.

"Mathieu doesn't have a background in bioscience. He's an engineer, and what he has achieved in his dissertation is to take a very topical subject and, using his well-honed project management expertise, he has broken it down into what needs to be done and devised a solution."

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