Concomitant Administration of Psychotropic and Prostate Cancer Drugs: A Pharmacoepidemiologic Study Using Drug–Drug Interaction Databases

Abstract

Prostate cancer (PC) represents the second most common diagnosed cancer in men. The burden of diagnosis and long-term treatment may frequently cause psychiatric disorders in patients, particularly depression. The most common PC treatment option is androgen deprivation therapy (ADT), which may be associated with taxane chemotherapy. In patients with both PC and psychiatric disorders, polypharmacy is frequently present, which increases the risk of drug–drug interactions (DDIs) and drug-related adverse effects. Therefore, this study aimed to conduct a pharmacoepidemiologic study of the concomitant administration of PC drugs and psychotropics using three drug interaction databases (Lexicomp®, drugs.com®, and Medscape®). This study assayed 4320 drug–drug combinations (DDCs) and identified 814 DDIs, out of which 405 (49.63%) were pharmacokinetic (PK) interactions and 411 (50.37%) were pharmacodynamic (PD) interactions. The most common PK interactions were based on CYP3A4 induction (n = 275, 67.90%), while the most common PD interactions were based on additive torsadogenicity (n = 391, 95.13%). Proposed measures for managing the identified DDIs included dose adjustments, drug substitutions, supplementary agents, parameters monitoring, or simply the avoidance of a given DDC. A significant heterogenicity was observed between the selected drug interaction databases, which can be mitigated by cross-referencing multiple databases in clinical practice.