No description available.

Targeted oral antineoplastic agents (OAs) have become a staple and rapidly growing field in the realm of cancer treatment. As with any chemotherapeutic/narrow spectrum agent, clinicians have to be aware of potential drug interactions that could interfere with therapy. Drug information databases are a common resource utilized to check for interactions between agents and patient's home medications. A major concern with OAs is that they are usually taken at home as well as picked up at a pharmacy by the patient themselves. With this kind of therapy adherence and patient side effect reporting becomes a concern. We wanted to determine the reliability of these databases for picking up potential interactions with patients on OAs. We accessed hospital records to find patients with various malignancies on OAs between the calendar year of 2013-2014, of which we found 876 that were screened for potential use of OAs. The goal was to find patients on OAs specifically and determine the number of drug interactions flagged by either drugs.com and/or Lexicomp®. In addition, the significance of the interaction as well as disagreements between databases were analyzed. A major interaction by Lexicomp® is defined as either a ‘D’ or an ‘X’ level interaction and on drugs.com is labeled ‘major.' Of the 876 screened we found 16 patients (one patient had tried 3 different agents, and another patient had tried two) on OAs. Lexicomp® flagged overall 42 interactions amongst all subjects, of which 17 were major interactions. Drugs.com flagged overall 44 interactions amongst all subjects, of which 11 were major interactions, being the more conservative of the two. Between the 2 databases there were 10 out of 18 major interactions that both were in agreement upon. These discrepancies are of concern in that clinicians hope that resources they utilize are incongruent with one another and allow them to practice in the safest manner in terms of avoided potential serious drug interactions whether it be harm to a patient or decreased effectiveness of the OA. Now that all patients have been screened, future research would be to determine the clinical significance of these interactions and whether or not they had an effect on patient outcomes.

No description available.