Pharmaceutical excipients are often used to make tablet formulations, which typically include a medicinal component in a solid dosage form. Depending on their intended application and manufacturing process, they may have a wide range of dimensions, shapes, weights, hardness, thickness, disintegration, and dissolving properties.
Solid-dosage forms are estimated to account for roughly 90% of all dosage forms used in clinical practise to administer medicinal substances. Tablets have become so popular because of the ease and variety with which they may be used.
Compression of granules or powder mixes is the primary method for making tablets, however moulding is also used for a small number of them. The vast majority of pills are taken orally. Colorants and coatings of all kinds are used in the preparation of many of these items. It is not uncommon for tablets to be made for a certain route of administration such as sublingual, buccal, or intravenous.
Types
Pills
When combined oral contraceptives were introduced in the 1960s, they were referred to as “the pill” because they were so effective. An initial definition of a pill was a round, tiny, solid pharmacological dose form. Tablets, capsules, and other forms of solid medicine, such as caplets, are all considered pills in today’s vernacular use.
Pills were first used in Ancient Rome. They were constructed of hydrozincite and smithsonite, zinc carbonates. The Roman ship Relitto del Pozzino, which sank in 140 BC, was discovered to contain the tablets, which were used to treat painful eyes. The pills, on the other hand, were designed to be applied to the eyes rather than ingested.
Caplets
Various colour and form variants of a common tablet design may be easily spotted. Smooth, coated, oval-shaped pills in the form of capsules are known as caplets. Caplets with an indentation going across the centre are easier to break in two. They’ve been the most widely accepted manner of taking medicine since their beginnings. In order to connect this good connotation to more effectively made tablet pills while also having an easier-to-swallow form than the conventional disk-shaped tablet, manufacturers of medications such as OTC analgesics invented the “caplet,” a portmanteau of capsule-shaped tablet.
Olanzapine tablets
Orally disintegrating tablets (ODT)
For a limited number of over-the-counter and prescription drugs, orally disintegrating tablets (ODTs) or orodispersible tablets (ODT) are available.
Film coated tablets (FCT)
Some prescription and over-the-counter (OTC) drugs are offered in film-coated tablet form. A delayed (modified) release of the drug material is made possible by the films employed to prevent denaturation by stomach acid (“retard effect”). Damage or breakage to such tablets is not permitted.
