Detection of Synergistic Interaction on an Additive Scale Between Two Drugs on Abnormal Elevation of Serum Alanine Aminotransferase Using Machine-Learning Algorithms

Drug-induced liver injury (DILI) is a common adverse drug reaction, with abnormal elevation of serum alanine aminotransferase (ALT). Several clinical studies have investigated whether a combination of two drugs alters the reporting frequency of DILI using traditional statistical methods such as multiple logistic regression (MLR), but this model may over-fit the data. This study aimed to detect a synergistic interaction between two drugs on the risk of abnormal elevation of serum ALT in Japanese adult patients using three machine-learning algorithms: MLR, logistic least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression, and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) algorithms. A total of 58,413 patients were extracted from Nihon University School of Medicine’s Clinical Data Warehouse and assigned to case (N = 4,152) and control (N = 54,261) groups. The MLR model over-fitted a training set. In the logistic LASSO regression model, three combinations showed relative excess risk due to interaction (RERI) for abnormal elevation of serum ALT: diclofenac and famotidine (RERI 2.427, 95% bootstrap confidence interval 1.226–11.003), acetaminophen and ambroxol (0.540, 0.087–4.625), and aspirin and cilostazol (0.188, 0.135–3.010). Moreover, diclofenac (adjusted odds ratio 1.319, 95% bootstrap confidence interval 1.189–2.821) and famotidine (1.643, 1.332–2.071) individually affected the risk of abnormal elevation of serum ALT. In the XGBoost model, not only the individual effects of diclofenac (feature importance 0.004) and famotidine (0.016), but also the interaction term (0.004) was included in important predictors. Although further study is needed, the combination of diclofenac and famotidine appears to increase the risk of abnormal elevation of serum ALT in the real world.