Safety of Memantine in Combination with Potentially Interactive Drugs in the Real World: A Pharmacovigilance Study Using the Japanese Adverse Drug Event Report (JADER) Database

BACKGROUND: Memantine, an NMDA receptor antagonist, is used for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. There is a caution to refrain from administrating memantine in combination with some specific drugs such as amantadine or dextromethorphan due to potential interactions that might augment the adverse effects of memantine. OBJECTIVE: This notification has not been validated in real-world data, which we aim to address using a large self-reporting database from Japan. METHODS: We conducted a disproportionality analysis using the Japanese Adverse Drug Event Report (JADER) database reported between April 2004 and March 2019 for detecting the neuropsychiatric adverse event (AE) signals associated with memantine and other potentially interactive drugs including amantadine, dextromethorphan, cimetidine, ranitidine, procainamide, quinidine, acetazolamide, citrate, and bicarbonate. Drug-drug interactions between memantine and these drugs were assessed using multiplicative and additive models. RESULTS: There was no statistically robust evidence to support multiplicative or additive interactions between memantine and the aforementioned drugs to increase the reporting of any included neuropsychiatric AEs or AE categories. CONCLUSION: The real-world JADER data did not raise the concern about the interactive increase in the neuropsychiatric AEs in patients with dementia taking memantine in combination with amantadine or dextromethorphan, suggesting there may be no urgent need to prohibit the co-administration of these drugs presently.