Effect of moisture on impact toughness of sugar-coated tablets manufactured by the dusting method

The purpose of this study was to clarify the effect of moisture on the impact toughness of sugar-coated tablets manufactured by the dusting method. We demonstrated that moisture plays an important role in the impact toughness of sugar-coated tablets. Moisturizing the sugar-coating layer resulted in enhancement of impact toughness of sugar-coated tablets, while reducing moisture in the sugar-coating layer resulted in weakening of the impact toughness. This was due to the characteristics of sucrose, the main ingredient of the sugar-coating layer, which is a soft and non-fragile material at high moisture levels, but hard and fragile at low moisture levels. We also demonstrated that friability as an indicator of impact toughness changed with time, and friability should be measured at 14 d after manufacture. This is due to moisture movement from outer sugar-coating layer into the inner sugar-coated tablets. Incorporating microcrystalline cellulose (MCC) in the subcoating layer resulted in sugar-coating layers with high resistance against impact even though moisture content of sugar-coated tablets was low. We confirmed the high impact toughness of the sugar-coated tablets with MCC whose moisture content was low from the results of both free fall and friability tests. We suggest that the dusting method using dusting powder containing MCC is a useful method for the production of sugar-coated tablets containing moisture sensitive drugs.