Abstract
BackgroundAdverse drug reactions are one of the most common causes of death in industrialized Western countries. Nowadays, empirical data from clinical studies for the approval and monitoring of drugs and molecular databases is available.MethodsThe integration of database information is a promising method for providing well-based knowledge to avoid adverse drug reactions. This paper presents our web-based decision support system GraphSAW which analyzes and evaluates drug interactions and side effects based on data from two commercial and two freely available molecular databases. The system is able to analyze single and combined drug-drug interactions, drug-molecule interactions as well as single and cumulative side effects. In addition, it allows exploring associative networks of drugs, molecules, metabolic pathways, and diseases in an intuitive way. The molecular medication analysis includes the capabilities of the upper features.ResultsA statistical evaluation of the integrated data and top 20 drugs concerning drug interactions and side effects is performed. The results of the data analysis give an overview of all theoretically possible drug interactions and side effects. The evaluation shows a mismatch between pharmaceutical and molecular databases. The concordance of drug interactions was about 12% and 9% of drug side effects. An application case with prescribed data of 11 patients is presented in order to demonstrate the functionality of the system under real conditions. For each patient at least two interactions occured in every medication and about 8% of total diseases were possibly induced by drug therapy.ConclusionsGraphSAW (http://tunicata.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/graphsaw/) is meant to be a web-based system for health professionals and researchers. GraphSAW provides comprehensive drug-related knowledge and an improved medication analysis which may support efforts to reduce the risk of medication errors and numerous drastic side effects.
Highlights
Adverse drug reactions are one of the most common causes of death in industrialized Western countries
The analysis of drug-drug interactions showed that at least two interactions occured in every medication of each patient
More than 30% of the molecular drug interactions and more than 61% of the molecular side effects were missing in the pharmaceutical database
Summary
Adverse drug reactions are one of the most common causes of death in industrialized Western countries. Over ten years it has been known that 1% of medication errors lead to adverse drug reactions (ADRs) [2,3] and are a common cause of death [4]. In 2001, a study by Ebbesen et al [5] provided reliable data on such deaths. They investigated 732 deaths among 13,992 patients over a treatment period of two years with regard to the cause of death and showed that 0.95% of patients in a department of internal medicine suffered fatal adverse drug events (ADEs). In case of Shoshi et al BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making (2015) 15:15
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