The College of Pharmacy discussed the MSc thesis entitled “Assessment of Medication-Related Burden among Patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease and its Relation with Disease Activity by the student Nawar Abdulridha Abood and the supervisor, Assistant Professor Dheyaa J. Kadhim, at the Clinical Pharmacy Department. The study aimed to measure medication-related burden among a sample of Iraqi patients with inflammatory bowel disease and to determine any associations between medication-related burden and some patient factors. The study included patients with inflammatory bowel disease if they were aged ≥ 18 years, had a disease duration of at least 6 months, and were taking at least one medication (for inflammatory bowel disease) on a regular basis. The Arabic version of the Living with Medicines questionnaire was used to measure the medication-related burden experienced by the patients. The study concluded that all the participants with inflammatory bowel disease were suffering from varying degrees of burden, and the most frequent degree was the minimum among Crohn’s disease patients and the moderate among ulcerative colitis patients. In both groups of patients, three domains reported the highest scores: “cost-related burden,” “concerns about medicine use,” and “autonomy to vary regimen”. The study recommended that treatment burdens need to be explicitly considered when making clinical and policy decisions about the management of IBD, and health care providers should adopt suitable interventional strategies to reduce such burdens.
