Film And Sugar Coating

A sugar coating is basically is a thick, hard coating of sugar surrounding the tablet inside. It is no different in design in reality to the sugar coatings place on Smarties® or Minstrels ®. This is a traditional method which has been used to hide the flavour of particularly unpleasant tasting drugs e.g. ibuprofen and quinine, both of which are very bitter. The other advantage of a sugar coating is that it can prevent light or moisture from affecting the drug's stability.

Due to the large increase in size of the tablet caused by sugar coating drug manufacturers have largely changed to using 'film coatings'. These are very thin layers of an inactive excipient coated thinly onto the tablet to again protect the tongue from the flavour of the contents and the contents from moisture and light. The film will however breakdown with a little agitation from the stomach and additional water in the form of saliva or stomach acid. As such film coatings do not significantly affect the way in which the drug is absorbed.

Consequently crushing tablets with film or sugar coatings may not seriously effect how the drug is released but may cause the resultant mixture to be unpleasant to taste.