Yes / Background: Online communities hold great potential as interventions for health, particularly for the management of chronic
illness. The social support that online communities can provide has been associated with positive treatment outcomes, including
medication adherence. There are few studies that have attempted to assess whether membership of an online community improves
health outcomes using rigorous designs.
Objective: Our objective was to conduct a rigorous proof-of-concept randomized controlled trial of an online community
intervention for improving adherence to asthma medicine.
Methods: This 9-week intervention included a sample of asthmatic adults from the United Kingdom who were prescribed an
inhaled corticosteroid preventer. Participants were recruited via email and randomized to either an “online community” or “no
online community” (diary) condition. After each instance of preventer use, participants (N=216) were required to report the
number of doses of medication taken in a short post. Those randomized to the online community condition (n=99) could read the
posts of other community members, reply, and create their own posts. Participants randomized to the no online community
condition (n=117) also posted their medication use, but could not read others’ posts. The main outcome measures were self-reported
medication adherence at baseline and follow-up (9 weeks postbaseline) and an objective measure of adherence to the intervention
(visits to site).
Results: In all, 103 participants completed the study (intervention: 37.8%, 39/99; control: 62.2%, 64/117). MANCOVA of
self-reported adherence to asthma preventer medicine at follow-up was not significantly different between conditions in either
intention-to-treat (P=.92) or per-protocol (P=.68) analysis. Site use was generally higher in the control compared to intervention
conditions.
Conclusions: Joining an online community did not improve adherence to preventer medication for asthma patients. Without
the encouragement of greater community support or more components / Funded by a pilot grant from the University of Leeds School of Psychology. A Fulbright Scholarship from the US-UK Fulbright Commission supported the first author
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/17669 |
| Date | 20 February 2020 |
| Creators | Koufopoulos, J.T., Conner, M.T., Gardner, Peter, Kellar, P. |
| Source Sets | Bradford Scholars |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article, Published version |
| Rights | ©Justin T Koufopoulos, Mark T Conner, Peter H Gardner, Ian Kellar. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (http://www.jmir.org), 13.06.2016. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on http://www.jmir.org/, as well as this copyright and license information must be included., CC-BY |
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