OMG: Texting No Help 4 Adherence 2 The Pill

Aug. 28, 2010— -- Sending text messages to remind women to take their oral contraceptive pills doesn't seem to work, according to researchers.

A randomized trial involving 82 women at a Boston Planned Parenthood Clinic found that missed pills were common whether the women got the reminders on their cell phone or not, Dr. Melody Y. Hou of Boston University and colleagues reported.

In fact, daily adherence to oral contraceptive use fell similarly over time in both groups, Hou and co-authors wrote in the September issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology.

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Forgetfulness is often cited by women as a top reason for nonadherence, but no strategy has yet been proven to overcome it -- including group motivation, structured, peer, or multicomponent counseling, and intensive reminders of appointments, the researchers noted.

The current trial recruited new users of birth control pills at the Planned Parenthood clinic. The women were all sexually active and had all chosen the pill as their mode of contraception, and all of them had mobile phones with text-messaging capabilities.

The women were assigned to receive their choice of commercially-available oral contraceptive pills from an electronic monitoring device that reported missed pills in real time via wireless transmission.

Nearly two thirds of the women had been on the pill in the past, half of them having typically used some type of reminder system, such as a cell phone or clock alarm.

Roughly one third of the women randomized to get the daily text message reminders had previously used this kind of additional reminder system. But 68 percent of those in the control group used a similar system to remember to take their pills during the study. This high rate of reminders mimicking the study intervention could account for the lack of benefit of text-message reminders, the researchers suggested.