Risk factors for potential drug-drug interactions in patients with myasthenia gravis

Our aim was to determine risk factors for and frequency of potential drug-drug interactions (pDDIs) among hospitalized patients with myasthenia gravis (MG).

This was a retrospective cross-sectional study of the-first time hospitalized MG patients or patients hospitalized because of the exacerbation of MG at the Neurology Clinic of the Clinical Center of Serbia, Belgrade. Medical records and discharge summaries of hospitalized MG patients over a 10-year period were reviewed. The pDDIs were identified by means of Micromedex, and multivariate regression methods were used to reveal potential predictors of number of pDDIs per patient.

The study included 687 patients with MG. In total, 2041 pDDIs were detected in 608 (88.5%) patients. Among the discovered pDDIs, 329 different pDDIs were observed. The most frequent pDDIs were pyridostigmine-prednisone (487patients/70.9%) and aspirin-prednisone (90 patients/13.1%) classified as moderate, and enalapril-potassium chloride (71patients/10.3%) classified as major pDDI. Five drugs (aspirin, insulin, prednisone, cyclosporine, metformin) were responsible for 22.6% of different pDDIs. Dyspnea, generalized form of MG, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, total number of drugs-used, use of antiplatelets were identified as the relevant risk factors for total number of pDDIs (R2 = 0.626,F = 73.797, p < 0.001), while age of patients and history of cancer were inversely correlated with such an outcome.

The frequency of the pDDIs in hospitalized MG patients is high, and adversely influenced by dyspnea, generalized MG, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, total number of drugs-used and use of antiplatelets.