Are Dose Administration Aids a Good Idea? — Chromatography Investigates

People who are long-term medication often make use of dose administration aids to help them maintain the prescribed regime. Dose administration aids are often simply a set of small boxes with the days of the week alongside morning and evening indicators on their lids. They can help people to know whether they have taken the required dose. But if tablets are decanted into dose administration aids — does this affect the medicine?

Tablet boxes helping people get better

As the population gets older and pharmaceutical companies deliver more medicines to help us live even longer, we are taking more and more pills. Taking multiple medicines is greatest amongst the older members of the population — it is a basic fact that the older we get, the more likely we are to get age-related illnesses. After all, our bodies are undergoing physiological changes and our minds psychological changes throughout our lives, so it is no wonder that when we get old we need more help to maintain our health.

Evidence from research studies suggests that dose administration aids can be of benefit to people taking multiple medicines, but the aids should be combined with other methods including education and lists of medicines. The research also suggests though, that these strategies only work when people want to take their medicines and are mentally and physically capable of using the dosage aids. But do the aids affect the medicines themselves?

Gran’s little tablet box

Dose administration aids are designed to help patients take their medicines in the correct dose at the right time. But what if the medicine has somehow changed whilst in the little box? After all, pharmaceutical companies probably spend millions developing the packaging to keep their drugs in a suitable environment inside a secure airtight blister pack. When we take the drug from its pack and keep it in a box, are we starting a deterioration process?

A recent paper published in the Journal of Pharmacy Practice and Research reports on a study carried out in Australia on the stability of warfarin tablets stored in tablet boxes and original packaging over a period of eight weeks. The tablets were then stored in normal room conditions. After eight weeks the chemical stability was checked using high performance liquid chromatography, a technique discussed in the article, Enhanced Peptide Identification Using Capillary UHPLC and Orbitrap Mass Spectrometry.

They found that there were no significant chemical changes between the two sets of tablets — the warfarin content remained the same. There were also no significant changes in physical conditions after eight weeks — both hardness and dissolution rates were the same between the two sets of pills.