Sodium lauryl sulfate as lubricant in tablets formulations: Is it worth?

Lubricants are excipients used in tablet formulations to reduce friction and adhesion forces within the die or on the punches surface during the manufacturing process. Despite these excipients are always required for the tablets production, their amount must be carefully evaluated since lubricants can negatively impact on mechanical strength, disintegration and dissolution behavior of solid dosage forms. Alternative compounds have been suggested to overcome the issues of conventional lubricants and sodium lauryl sulfate (SDS) is one of the most promising one. Despite SDS has been object of several investigations, a definitive conclusion on its effectiveness cannot still be drawn. Particularly, its efficacy on tablets disaggregation and API dissolution is still unclear. Here, the effect of SDS on all the relevant features of tablets and tableting process has been evaluated on immediate release hydrophobic tablets formulations in comparison with conventional lubricants. The results of this investigation are quite outspoken: SDS has a low lubricant power while it determines only a limited improvement on tablets hardness. It greatly improves the tablets wettability but only on model formulations, the presence of superdisintegrants resets its effectiveness and any possible effect on tablets disaggregation. None of the tested formulations showed improvement on the API dissolution rate.

Effects of different steam injection conditions on cappuccino's nutritional profile.

The quality parameters of cappuccinos prepared with pasteurized milk or ultra-high-temperature milk steam-injected at different temperatures by a professional coffee machine have been assessed. In particular, the protein profile, the content of vitamins and lactose, the lipid peroxidation process, and the involvement of milk proteins in the foam formation were evaluated. The nutritional quality of milk seems not affected by the steam injection treatment carried out at a temperature of 60-65 °C, but at higher temperatures a decrement of lactoperoxidase, vitamin B6 and folic acid was observed. The milk used in cappuccino preparation is very important: pasteurized milk can form a more consistent and lasting foam with respect to ultra-high-temperature milk because of the presence of ß-lactoglobulin and lactoferrin, both playing an important role in the foam formation and stability. This work would provide additional information to the coffee industry for the preparation of high nutritional and organoleptic quality cappuccinos.