Types of tablets

 

Types of tablets

Compressed Tablets

The tablets are formed by compression of powdered, crystalline, or granular active materials (API), alone or in combination with certain excipients as required, such as binders, disintegrants, sustained release polymers, lubricants, diluents, flavors and colorants.

A.   Sugar coated tablets

B.   Film coated tablets

C.   Enteric-coated tablets

D.   Multi compressed tablets: these are compressed tablets made by more than one compression cycle.

o   Layered tablets

o   Press coated tablets

E.   Sustained release tablets

F.    Tablets for solution

G.   Effervescent tablets

H.   Compressed suppositories or inserts

I.      Buccal and sublingual tablets

 

Molded tablets or tablet triturates

Tablet triturates usually are made from moist material, using a mold that gives them the shape of cut sections of cylinder. Such tablets must be completely and rapidly soluble. Suitable water-soluble lubricant is many times a constraint.

 

Dispensing Tablets

These tablets provide a convenient quality of potent drug that can be incorporated readily in to powders and liquids, thus circumventing the necessity to weigh small quantities. These tablets are supplied primarily as a convenience for extemporaneous compounding and never dispensed as a dosage form.

 

Hypodermic Tablets

Hypodermic tablets are soft, readily soluble tablets. Though these tablets are now made for oral administration they are not yet recognized by the official compendia.

 

Advantages of the tablets

The additional advantages of tablet dosages forms are as follows:

• Their cost is lowest of all the dosage forms.

• They are in general the easiest and cheapest to package and ship of all oral dosage forms.

• They may provide the greatest ease of swallowing with the least tendency for “hang-up” above the stomach, especially when coated, provided that tablet disintegration is not excessively rapid.

• They lend themselves to certain special release profile products, such as enteric or delayed release products.

• They are better suited to large-scale production than the other unit oral forms.

• They have the best-combined properties of chemical, mechanical and microbiological stability of all the oral forms.

Disadvantages of the tablets

For very few disadvantages, these dosage forms are most suitable and widely accepted:

• Some drugs resist compression in to dense particles, owing to their amorphous nature or flocculent, low density character.

• Drugs with poor wetting, slow dissolution properties, intermediate to large dosages, optimum absorption high in the GIT or any combination of these features are very challenging for the formulators.