Decrease in the amount of lactose as a diluent for the powder dispensing and its evaluation

We have added pharmacologically inactive agent, lactose, to adjust total weight of one piece of packaged medicine to 0.3 g, when the quantity of medicine required are less than 0.3 g in the Pharmacy of Chiba University Hospital. However, it is sometimes difficult for children to ingest 0.3 g of powder. In addition, patients who need to intake several drugs simultaneously from a tube have some troubles in obstruction of the tube. On the other hand, variation in weight of packaged medicine is getting smaller due to progress of automatic powder packaging machine and the surrounding instruments. Thus we investigated whether we could decrease a total amount of packaged medicine with keeping variation of the weight within the range of specification. Weight variation of dispensed powder and loss of drug during dispensing or taking out the powder from packaging were within the range of specification even in the case of 0.2g of packaged powder, suggesting that we could decrease the total amount of powder to 0.2g without diminishing the quality. Moreover, we revealed that this change made us free from about one tenth of dilution works.