Evaluating drug-drug interaction information in NDF-RT and DrugBank

BACKGROUND: There is limited consensus among drug information sources on what constitutes drug-drug interactions (DDIs). We investigate DDI information in two publicly available sources, NDF-RT and DrugBank. METHODS: We acquire drug-drug interactions from NDF-RT and DrugBank, and normalize the drugs to RxNorm. We compare interactions between NDF-RT and DrugBank and evaluate both sources against a reference list of 360 critical interactions. We compare the interactions detected with NDF-RT and DrugBank on a large prescription dataset. Finally, we contrast NDF-RT and DrugBank against a commercial source. RESULTS: DrugBank drug-drug interaction information has limited overlap with NDF-RT (24-30%). The coverage of the reference set by both sources is about 60%. Applied to a prescription dataset of 35.5M pairs of co-prescribed systemic clinical drugs, NDF-RT would have identified 808,285 interactions, while DrugBank would have identified 1,170,693. Of these, 382,833 are common. The commercial source Multum provides a more systematic coverage (91%) of the reference list. CONCLUSIONS: This investigation confirms the limited overlap of DDI information between NDF-RT and DrugBank. Additional research is required to determine which source is better, if any. Usage of any of these sources in clinical decision systems should disclose these limitations. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13326-015-0018-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.