The CDC and Journal of the American Medical Association report that adverse drug reactions are a major health issue in America, costing billions of dollars a year and affecting millions of patients. Many of these are the typical drug-drug interactions (DDI) that most EHRs and e-prescribing systems can catch. However, typical DDI programs miss drug-gene interactions (DGI’s). Only YouScript® can detect both DDI’s and DGI’s. And only YouScript can find their combined effect — the drug-drug-gene interactions.

Drug-drug-gene interactions (DDGI’s) happen to drugs which have two or more metabolic pathways when one pathway is reduced by a genetic mutation and the other pathway is blocked by an inhibiting drug.

But how common are DGI’s and DDGI’s? Until now, the prevalence of DGI’s and DDGI’s compared to DDI’s hasn’t been examined. But a new paper is now being published by the journal, Pharmacogenomics.

Titled How common are drug and gene interactions? Prevalence in a sample of 1143 patients with CYP2C9, CYP2C19 and CYP2D6 genotyping, the paper shows that typical DDI programs may miss more than a third of all potentially clinically significant interactions.

The paper, written by Genelex’s P. Verbeurgt, T. Mamiya, and J. Oesterheld, will be published this April in Pharmacogenomics, Issue 15 (Volume 5).