Introduction: American Diabetes Association categorizes barriers to adherence as either patient barriers, medication factors, or system factors. The aim of the study is to understand the barriers and behaviors of insulin therapy among T2DM patients in India from a real world setting.
Methods: The data is collected from an ongoing patient support program called as iTAP (Insulin Therapy Assistance Program) designed by Biocon in patients with T2DM receiving insulin. It’s an open label, multicentric, real world data depicting 10426 T2DM patients, of which 3192 (30.61%) patients have moved on to various therapies observed over 9 months. Data of these 3192 patients were analyzed to understand the reasons for shift in therapy.
Results: The prime behavioral change is from insulin to oral hypoglycaemic drugs (64.35%) and others are, short term insulin therapy (12.81%), and change/shift from an ampoule to vial dosage (6.11%). The primary barriers in insulin therapies were hypoglycaemic episodes (25.9%), stress (17.1%), fear of injection (10.3%) and cost (7.4%).
Conclusion: There is an underwhelming amount of data on interventions to addressing those barriers or even aimed at improving insulin adherence in general. Education and empowerment (stress, fear of injection and cost) through shared decision-making allow patients’ preferences to be presented and considered and subsequently generate the best individualized treatment plan for each patients.
P. Raj: Employee; Self; Biocon. D. Pawar: Employee; Self; Biocon. S. Jabeen: Employee; Self; Biocon. S. Vs: Employee; Self; Biocon.
