INTRODUCTION: Current drug-drug interaction (DDI) detection methods often miss the aspect of temporal plausibility, leading to false-positive disproportionality signals in spontaneous reporting system (SRS) databases.

OBJECTIVE: This study aims to develop a method for detecting and prioritizing temporally plausible disproportionality signals of DDIs in SRS databases by incorporating co-exposure time in disproportionality analysis.

METHODS: The method was tested in the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS). The CRESCENDDI dataset of positive controls served as the primary source of true-positive DDIs. Disproportionality analysis was performed considering the time of co-exposure. Temporal plausibility was assessed using the flex point of cumulative reporting of disproportionality signals. Potential confounders were identified using a machine learning method (i.e. Lasso regression).

RESULTS: Disproportionality analysis was conducted on 122 triplets with more than three cases, resulting in the prioritization of 61 disproportionality signals (50.0%) involving 13 adverse events, with 61.5% of these included in the European Medicine Agency's (EMA's) Important Medical Event (IME) list. A total of 27 signals (44.3%) had at least ten cases reporting the triplet of interest, and most of them (n = 19; 70.4%) were temporally plausible. The retrieved confounders were mainly other concomitant drugs.

CONCLUSIONS: Our method was able to prioritize disproportionality signals with temporal plausibility. This finding suggests a potential for our method in pinpointing signals that are more likely to be furtherly validated.