Characterization and classification of adverse drug interactions.

Drug interactions which may cause harmful events are important for our health and new drag development. In the previous work, we extracted the drug interaction data from Japanese drug package inserts and generated the drug interaction network. The network contains a large number of drugs densely connected to each other, where drug targets and drug-metabolizing enzymes were shared in the drug interactions. In this study, we further analyzed the obtained drug interaction network by merging drugs into drug categories based on the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) classification. The merged data of drug interactions indicated drug properties that are related to drug interaction mechanisms or symptoms. We investigated the relationships between the drug groups and drug interaction mechanisms or symptoms.