| Introduction: Drug-drug interactions (DDIs)
are the main causes of the adverse drug reactions
and the nature of the functional and molecular
complexity of drugs behavior in the human body
make DDIs hard to prevent and threat. With the
aid of new technologies derived from mathematical
and computational science, the DDI problems can
be addressed with a minimum cost and effort.
The Market Basket Analysis (MBA) is known as
a powerful method for the identification of cooccurrence
of matters for the discovery of patterns and the frequency of the elements involved.
Methods: In this research, we used the MBA method to identify important bio-elements in the
occurrence of DDIs. For this, we collected all known DDIs from DrugBank. Then, the obtained
data were analyzed by MBA method. All drug-enzyme, drug-carrier, drug-transporter and drugtarget
associations were investigated. The extracted rules were evaluated in terms of the confidence
and support to determine the importance of the extracted bio-elements.
Results: The analyses of over 45 000 known DDIs revealed over 300 important rules from 22 085
drug interactions that can be used in the identification of DDIs. Further, the cytochrome P450
(CYP) enzyme family was the most frequent shared bio-element. The extracted rules from MBA
were applied over 2 000 000 unknown drug pairs (obtained from FDA approved drugs list), which
resulted in the identification of over 200 000 potential DDIs.
Conclusion: The discovery of the underlying mechanisms behind the DDI phenomena can help
predict and prevent the inadvertent occurrence of DDIs. Ranking of the extracted rules based on
their association can be a supportive tool to predict the outcome of unknown DDIs. |