Incidence and risk factors for potential drug-drug interactions in outpatients receiving opioid analgesics

ABSTRACT

Background

Opioids are the most frequently used drugs to treat pain in cancer patients. However opioid analgesics can cause adverse effects and potential drug-drug interaction.

Research design and methods

This cross-sectional retrospective study analyzed pDDI in 1839 patients with opioid analgesics in a large comprehensive hospital in China from January 1 to 31 December 2022. Three drug interaction databases were used to screen for pDDI including Drugs (U.S.A.), Medscape (U.S.A.), and Drug Assistant of Dingxiangyuan (China).

Results

The prevalence of pDDIs among 1839 patients was around 41.27% of 759 patients, and 564 patients (74.31%) with pDDIs were diagnosed with tumor. Further, the total of 275 various pDDIs combinations were identified. The combination of oxycodone with morphine had the most frequent occurrence of 229 times, and its adverse effects mainly related to exacerbate central respiratory depression. While, gender, tumor, number of diagnoses, and the variety of opioid analgesics used were independent risk factors for pDDIs.

Conclusions

Outpatients taking opioid analgesics had a higher incidence of pDDIs. As consequently, optimized monitoring and management of patients taking opioid analgesics is recommended in order to ensure patient medication safety.

KEYWORDS:

• Potential drug-drug interactions
• opioid analgesics
• outpatients
• cancer pain
• risk factors

Declaration of interest

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or material discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or mending, or royalties.

Reviewer disclosures

Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial or other relationships to disclose.

Author contributions

F Chu, Y Yao, B Gao, and M Huang screened, analyzed, and counted the data; L Kong offered the overall guidance on drafting and revising the paper; Fei Chu also handled the conceptual design of the study, the arrangement of the data, and the writing of the article. Every author claims responsibility for each component of the work.

Supplementary materials

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/14740338.2024.2346101

Additional information

Funding

This paper was funded by the Anhui Province key clinical specialty construction project, the College Students’ Innovation and Entrepreneurship Training Program (S202310367121), the Humanity and Social Science Research Project of Anhui Educational Committee (SK2021A0445), and the Open Project of Anhui Engineering Technology Research Center of Biochemical Pharmaceutical (Bengbu Medical College) (2022SYKFD04).