Primary medication non-adherence after discharge from a general internal medicine service.

Background: Medication non-adherence frequently leads to suboptimal patient outcomes. Primary non-adherence, which occurs when a patient does not fill an initial prescription, is particularly important at the time of hospital discharge because new medications are often being prescribed to treat an illness rather than for prevention.

Methods: We studied older adults consecutively discharged from a general internal medicine service at a large urban teaching hospital to determine the prevalence of primary non-adherence and identify characteristics associated with primary non-adherence.

Aggregation of neurodegenerative disease in ALS kindreds.

The objective was to investigate the familial occurrence of the neurodegenerative condition amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Parkinson's disease and dementia in the relatives of Irish ALS patients. A retrospective case control chart review study was conducted to extract the neurological family histories of Irish ALS patients and controls who attended the National Neurological Centre between January 2001 and January 2006. In total, details were extracted from 197 ALS and 235 general neurology pedigrees.