New online tool allows pharmacists and dietitians to search for drug-nutrition interactions

A new subscription-based online tool is offering pharmacists, dietitians and other healthcare professionals a streamlined way to search for how drugs interact with certain nutrients.Drug Nutrition Interactions (DNI) launched last week and contains information on more than 1,000 drugs. DNI president and B.C.-based clinical pharmacist Dean Elbe, PharmD, BCPP, says the website was four years in the making and involved a team of several expert pharmacists and a PhD dietitian.“[We] curated the content and devised a systematic way to look at the product monographs and prescribing information in Canada and the U.S. . . . combined with additional information from the medical literature,” Elbe explained in an interview.Prior to the launch of the website, a go-to resource for drug-nutrition interactions has been the Food Medication Interactions handbook, of which Elbe was a co-author and editor. However, the book’s primary author, Pennsylvania-based dietitian Zaneta M Pronsky, died in 2011, and after the 19th edition in 2018, the book is now out of print.“There are some textbooks and articles out there, but it wasn't really drawn together anywhere else except this Food Medication Interactions manual. And so now that it's no longer publishing, we needed a solution out there for dietitians and pharmacists and other healthcare providers,” Elbe said.The main page of the site features a search bar that allows users to search for medications by the generic or brand name. Each drug has a page with details on how it interacts with alcohol, grapefruit, natural products and diet in general. There is also information on protein bindings, adverse effects, monitoring parameters, warning labelling information for both the U.S. and Canada, and links to product monographs.“What you see when you click through, you get a very customizable view of the drug information. You can really tailor it to what matters to you most,” Elbe said.DNI subscribers also get access to 14 tables, which include lab values in SI units, information on insulin products, as well as interactive tables on natural product, alcohol and grapefruit interactions, among others. There are also tables that look at different nutritional sources of certain nutrients, such as magnesium or potassium, and several tables that look at different macronutrients in food, like caffeine or gluten.In addition, DNI offers six calculators that can measure BMI, segmental weight, ideal body weight, nutrition requirements, estimated glomerular filtration rate and body surface area.Subscriptions start at C$39.99 (US$34.99) annually, with student subscriptions being offered at C$24.99 (US$19.99) per year. Elbe is also offering a C$10 off discount code for Canadian Healthcare Network readers with the promo code CHN202407999, valid until Sept. 30, 2024.In addition, there is an optional add-on module for 30 HIV-related drugs, and DNI is currently working on another add-on to include more than 200 oncology drugs. “The field [of oncology] has really just exploded,” he said. “It’s not just cancer chemotherapy anymore. It’s small molecule, oral, targeted therapies, and so there's so many of those coming out. So, we're going to have a full DNI workup of these—over 200 oncology drugs—when that module launches, hopefully in late 2024.”

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