Drug-gene interactions in older patients with coronary artery disease

Older patients with coronary artery disease (CAD) are particularly vulnerable to the efficacy and adverse drug reactions, and may therefore particularly benefit from personalized medication. Drug-gene interactions (DGIs) occur when an individual's genotype affects the pharmacokinetics and/or pharmacodynamics of a victim drug.

This study aimed to investigate the impact of cardiovascular-related DGIs on the clinical efficacy and safety outcomes in older patients with CAD.

Hospitalized older patients (≥ 65 years old) with CAD were consecutively recruited from August 2018 to May 2022. Eligible patients were genotyped for the actionable pharmacogenetic variants of CYP2C9, CYP2C19, CYP2D6, CYP3A5, and SLCO1B1, which had clinical annotations or implementation guidelines for cardiovascular drugs. Allele frequencies and DGIs were determined in the cohort for the 5 actionable PGx genes and the prescribed cardiovascular drugs. All patients were followed up for at least 1 year. The influence of DGIs on the cardiovascular drug-related efficacy outcomes (all-cause mortality and/or major cardiovascular events, MACEs) and drug response phenotypes of "drug-stop" and "dose-decrease" were evaluated.

A total of 1,017 eligible older patients with CAD were included, among whom 63.2% were male, with an average age of 80.8 years old, and 87.6% were administrated with polypharmacy (≥ 5 medications). After genotyping, we found that 96.0% of the older patients with CAD patients had at least one allele of the 5 pharmacogenes associated with a therapeutic change, indicating a need for a therapeutic change in a mean of 1.32 drugs of the 19 cardiovascular-related drugs. We also identified that 79.5% of the patients had at least one DGI (range 0-6). The median follow-up interval was 39 months. Independent of age, negative association could be found between the number of DGIs and all-cause mortality (adjusted HR: 0.84, 95% CI: 0.73-0.96, P = 0.008), and MACEs (adjusted HR: 0.84, 95% CI: 0.72-0.98, P = 0.023), but positive association could be found between the number of DGIs and drug response phenotypes (adjusted OR: 1.24, 95% CI: 1.05-1.45, P = 0.011) in the elderly patients with CAD.

The association between cardiovascular DGIs and the clinical outcomes emphasized the necessity for the integration of genetic and clinical data to enhance the optimization of cardiovascular polypharmacy in older patients with CAD. The causal relationship between DGIs and the clinical outcomes should be established in the large scale prospectively designed cohort study.