Adherence and abandonment to tuberculosis treatment: a literature review

Abstract

Although tuberculosis is a disease known worldwide for its impact on the population, there are currently a number of factors that lead to a lack of adherence and withdrawal from treatment. In view of the need to report on these factors, the aim was to analyze the causes that reflect the lack of adherence to tuberculosis treatment. This is an integrative review, in which the search for papers was carried out through the following databases: MEDLINE, LILACS, BDENF, SciELO, using the keywords “tuberculosis”, “adherence to treatment”, “treatment dropout”, with the help of the Boolean operators “AND” and “OR”. The following inclusion criteria were adopted: papers in Portuguese and English, whose theme has relevance to the proposed subject, in temporal cut between the years 2011-2021. The results showed that socio-economic and socio-cultural factors have the greatest influence on the non-adherence to treatment. Low level of education, as well as access to information, is present in the population characterized as treatment dropouts. This means that health education needs to be intensified in order to reduce the number of uninformed people, as well as the applicability of public policies that aim to meet the needs of those affected by these factors. A limiting factor of this study is the scarcity of studies in the area aligned with methodological ways of analyzing the object of study.