• Journal of Pharmaceutical Investigation
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• v.37 no.2
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• pp.119-126
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• 2007

Tablet splitting is used in pharmacy practice to adjust the dose to be administered. However, it also causes several problems such as undesirable effect for sustained release or enteric-coated dosage form, inaccuracy of dose, and pharmacist's safety by splitting hazardous drugs. This study investigated the current status of oral dosage form splitting for patients older than 19 years by analyzing Korea National Health Insurance Claims Database. Out of oral solid drugs prescribed (N=1,486,584) 9.8% of them included tablets (or capsules) split. There were some splitting cases even in sustained release (4.9%), enteric-coated forms (1.3%) and hazardous drugs (2.7%) that were selected by NIOSH (The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health). The most frequently split drugs were antihistamines, neuropsychotics and steroids. In case of digoxin and warfarin, unit doses in a domestic market were not diverse compared to foreign markets. Guidelines for splitting oral solid dosage forms, approval of diverse doses and conducting dose-response studies for the commonly splitting ingredients on Korean people are needed for the saff and effective use of oral solid drugs.

• Korean Journal of Clinical Pharmacy
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.231-237
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• 2019

Objective: The aim of this study was to analyze the status of split tablet prescription in South Korea. Methods: We conducted this analysis using 2016 National Patient Sample data from the Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service. We computed split tablet prescription rates by sex and age and determined which medicine and medical specialties had the highest split tablet prescribing rates. Results: The proportion of prescriptions that included split tablets was 15.6% (n=6,687,35). The proportion of prescriptions that included split tablets was higher for females (56.7%) than for males (43.3%), while that of prescriptions including split tablets versus total prescriptions for each sex was higher for males (16.4%) than for females (14.9%) (p<0.001). In the age group under 19 years, the proportion of prescriptions including split tablets (53.7%) was more than half of the total. The highest tablet splitting rate was found to be 89.9% for formoterol fumarate (40 ㎍), and pseudoephedrine hydrochloride (60 mg) had the highest number of prescriptions. Pediatrics (65.6%) was the medical field with the highest rate of split tablet prescription. Conclusion: Split tablets were most prescribed to pediatric patients. To minimize the use of split tablets, it is necessary to develop lower dose tablets and establish a policy that promotes prescription of these lower-dose tablets.

• YAKHAK HOEJI
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• v.48 no.1
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• pp.60-64
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• 2004

Near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy was used to determine rapidly and nondestructively the content of ambroxol in intact ambroxol tablets containing 30 mg (12.5％ m/m nominal concentration) by collecting NIR spectra in range 1100-1750 nm. The laboratory-made samples had 10.3∼15.9％ m/m nominal ambroxol concentration. The measurements were made by reflection using a fiber-optic probe and calibration was carried out by partial least square regression (PLSR) with autoscaling. Model validation was performed by randomly splitting the data set into calibration and validation data set (7 samples as a calibration data set and 5 samples as a validation data set). The developed NIR method gave results comparable to the known values of tablets in a laboratorial manufacturing Process, standard error of calibration (SEC) and standard error of prediction (SEP) being 0.49％ and 0.49％ m/m respectively. The method showed good accuracy and repeatability NIR spectroscopic determination in intact tablets allowed the potential use of real time monitoring for a running production process.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.50 no.2
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• pp.143-151
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• 2013

NAND flash-based SSDs (Solid State Drive) have advantages of fast input/output performance and low power consumption so that they could be widely used as storages on tablet, desktop PC, smart-phone, and server. But, SSD has the disadvantage of wear-leveling due to increase of the number of writes. In order to improve the lifespan of the SSD, a variety of data deduplication techniques have been introduced. General fixed-size splitting method allocates fixed size of chunk without considering locality of data so that it may execute unnecessary chunking and hash key generation, and variable-size splitting method occurs excessive operation since it compares data byte-by-byte for deduplication. This paper proposes adaptive chunking method based on application locality and file name locality of written data in SSD-based server storage. The proposed method split data into 4KB or 64KB chunks adaptively according to application locality and file name locality of duplicated data so that it can reduce the overhead of chunking and hash key generation and prevent duplicated data writing. The experimental results show that the proposed method can enhance write performance, reduce power consumption and operation time compared to existing variable-size splitting method and fixed size splitting method using 4KB.

• YAKHAK HOEJI
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• v.58 no.1
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• pp.40-46
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• 2014

Drugs with a narrow therapeutic index (NTI) require very precise dosing. Warfarin and digoxin are the examples of NTI-drugs and dosing of them varies widely for different patients. However, in South Korea, only two strengths of warfarin and one of digoxin are commercially available. This is a big barrier for the precise dispensing and has potential safety risks to patients, particularly to elderly patients. To find a potential solution to the problem, an analysis of the prescribed doses and dispensing patterns of those drugs was performed. Data were collected by computer-facilitated prescription review in a university hospital. The period screened was from May 1st, 2012 to April 30th, 2013. All the prescriptions with either warfarin or digoxin tablets were selected for this study and dispensing patterns were analyzed according to the prescribed doses. A total of 17,017 warfarin prescriptions were analyzed; 8,148 for inpatient prescriptions, 8,869 for outpatient prescriptions, respectively. Of the 23 kinds of prescribed doses, 2 mg (19.9%) was most frequent, followed by 3 mg (13.2%) and 2.5 mg (11.7%). By analyzing the dispensing patterns, 60.3% (10,253) of the prescriptions required pill splitting and 72.0% of them were for the patients 65 years old and over. On the other hand, 4,350 digoxin prescriptions were included in this study. Of the 6 kinds of prescribed doses, 0.125 mg (71.2%) was most frequent, followed by 0.0625 mg (20.2%). Among the prescriptions for digoxin, 92.0% (3,998) should be split and 65.7% of them were for the patients aged 65 years and over. Despite limitations of strengths, various doses of warfarin and digoxin were prescribed. Furthermore, more than half of the prescriptions that required pill splitting were for elderly patients. The results from this study suggest that different strengths of warfarin and digoxin should be provided for accuracy of dispensing and safety for patients receiving them.