抄録
Oral rapid disintegrating tablets are taken in an epochal dosage form which makes drug ingestion less trou-blesome for patients. It has indeed contributed a great deal to an improvement in the quality of health care. On the other hand, however, rapid disintegrating tablets are more vulnerable to physical impact than uncoated tablets so that one-dose packages of oral rapid disintegrating tablets may present problems when being dispensed by a fully automatic tablet packing machine. The present study was conducted to evaluate the suitability to automatic mechanical dispensing of Enalapril M Tablet 5mg EMEC® and Brotizolam M Tablet 0.25mg EMEC® (rapid disintegrating tablets produced from Elmed Eisai Co., Ltd., that have been developed in dosageforms amenable to automatic mechanical dispensing) by 18 pharmacists.
The rejection rate was a meager 0.3% for both Enalapril and Brotizolam tablets. Errors occurred with a higher frequency when the rotor cassette was loaded in a mid-position than at another position. The results of experimental dispensing suggested that the greater the degree of the hardness or the heavier the weight of the tablets, the less damage that was done to them and thus the higher the rate of acceptance. When Enalapril® was administered with different tablets together, the relative rate of acceptance was Zyloric® > Amlodin® > Mevalotin®. When Brotizolam was administered with Depas®, a high rate of acceptance was shown, but when it was dispensed with Etizolam, it showed a low rate of acceptance, and its packages also contained many damaged tablets.
