A Comprehensive Review on Determinants of Poor Treatment Adherence among Type 2 Diabetes Patients and Low Health Literacy

Both preventive and therapeutic interventions are necessary for good diabetes management and the prevention of complications. There are serious therapeutic and financial repercussions when patients don't follow their doctors' orders about medicine, nutrition, and healthcare procedures. The current comprehensive review aims to determine factors that have been observed in patients with type 2 diabetes and low health literacy, contribute to poor treatment adherence in 2022. Five steps were taken to complete this review: creating a research question, looking for and extracting relevant papers, choosing relevant studies, tabulating data, and reporting findings. Using the terms "Type 2 diabetes", "obstacles", "determinants", "factors", "barriers", "treatment", "medication", "therapy" "adherence", "non-adherence", "poor adherence", and "low health literacy" was gathered from six electronic databases (Scopus, Web of Science, Embase, Science Direct, PubMed and Google Scholar) from January 2018 to January 2022. Twelve were able to be reviewed from the initial 140 articles. In this review, ten studies have been selected involving 1497 patients with type 2 diabetes. The range of nonadherence prevalence was from 42% to 74.3%. Economic difficulties, inadequate communication with the medical staff, an absence of family support, ignorance, misinterpretation, and low health literacy were major barriers to treatment adherence in the publications. The findings of this study identified both modifiable and non-modifiable factors influencing medication adherence in type 2 diabetes patients. Modifiable factors must be addressed by suitable interventions carried out with the target population and healthcare experts.