Marijn de Bruin

Marijn de Bruin replied to "Interested in Clinical Input on new HAART Adherence Diagnostic" in the Adherence & Retention community.

Dear Cathie, Interesting. I have some questions about this assessment. - do you already have data on how well variability in urine drug levels relate with actual (timing of) intake? There are already sources of variance to consider when using drug levels in blood. I assume there are more sources when looking at the urine. So the question is whether you would be developing a product for checking whether medicines have been taken at all ...

Marijn de Bruin started a discussion "QoL and cost measurement in adherence trial: Computer Assisted Telephone Interviews?" in the Adherence & Retention community.

Dear colleagues, I am preparing a multi-center trial to study the cost-effectiveness of an intervention to promote HIV-treatment adherence. The intervention will be delivered by HIV-nurses during patients’ routine clinical visits. As part of the study we need to obtain information through patient questionnaires, like quality of life and health care use during the last month. Part of the patients will be illiterate and/or may not have access to a private setting with a computer ...

Marijn de Bruin replied to "MEMS-use for adherence monitoring in resource poor settings" in the Adherence & Retention community.

Dear Ann, that's an interesting article indeed. It does observe many of the issues we also encountered in the Netherlands. In the Tanzanian context, however, the situation was somewhat different: a- no week boxes, b- no pill bottle openings not accounted for by pill intake. And one of the major barriers we observed among Dutch HIV-patients specifically, due to fear for disclosure, was not taking the bottle along in public areas. We observed the opposite ...

Marijn de Bruin started a discussion "MEMS-use for adherence monitoring in resource poor settings" in the Adherence & Retention community.

Dear all, I wondered what other people think about the results of this feasibility study. Particularly: 1- Part of the patients I work with in the Netherlands have some issues with MEMS-design (looks like pill bottle: 'others may ask questions'). I expected this to be worse in Tanzania where fear for status disclosure seems considerably higher. Yet, patients thought the bottles reduced stigma (looks like lotion bottle; no sticker on it with medication names). Is ...

Marijn de Bruin replied to "To count lost to-follow-up (LTFU) as part of adherence denominator?" in the Adherence & Retention community.

Dear all (topic: LTFU & adherence denominator), Very interesting discussion and a few thoughts. Vrijens and Urquhart wrote some interesting papers on this as well, using the terms “persistence” for ‘the time elapsed between the first dose taken and time of treatment discontinuation’ and adherence as a measure for the quality of execution of the prescribed intake when on treatment. In hypertension treatment, they found that the majority of the “fall” in adherence was due ...