VallejoSheltie
Forums Enthusiast
Sorry if this is long-winded...
Thats a good point, however I'm not sure your point about there needing to be a scoring is accurate. Many types of medicine can be split which do not have a line. Just checked with my DW an RN to confirm. While there is a general rule that they teach that is along those lines, Dr's and insurance companies often suggest it and the insurance companies will often pay for a pill cutter.
On the Manufacturer's side of things, there is usually no economic benefit for a Manf. to add a tablet score to advise the consumer. They usually add it for those low market conditions where a mid-level dose is ocassionally needed but re-tooling up a product line to make that specific dose would not be cost effective. Adding a score to their 100mg tablet for example is not a financially sound move when they also offer a 50mg tablet at 60-70% the cost of the 100mg. You don't cut your own throat in business, and I doubt companies making lower tier (compared to human/FDA) formulations are any dumber.
OK, just deleted 3 paragraphs about what I've seen in pharma and the bio manufacturing industry. But found a cool video, that shows basic pills/caps being made: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrAHTmq-DLE
In short, outside of some formulations such as listed here: http://news.consumerreports.org/hea...dos-and-donts-drug-safety-best-buy-drugs.html many pills in general can be split safely.
For Interceptor, and Sentinel, I am quite sure they are using standard dry/liquid component mixing, as they are able to guarantee 2.3mg (Interceptor) of Milbemycin in what is probably a 100-200mg tablet. That means they have a 1-2% active ingredient accuracy in their product stream.
I'm sorry, but in my estimation, you are not going to get clumping or odd ingredient distributions on a per pill basis at those levels.
Not that I would recommend doing this if I was giving my dog actual medication above whats being discussed in this thread, unless my vet, or confirmation from the drug manfufacturer were received.
And, Milbemycin has very low toxicity, and I think I read that Lufenuron has much much lower than that. I read people are using it off-label to treat persistant Candida in humans at the gram+ level.
So, even if you were worried about a possible deviation in how much ingredient were actually in each pill half, I don't think there would be much to worry about unless your dog was at a weight that was close (10%?) of needing to go to the next stronger version.
IE. Your dog weighs 25#, and you normally use Interceptor @5.75mg.
To be economical, you get the next size up (26-50#) @11.5mg, split it in half and think you should be good. Problem is you're most likely going to be off by 10% as pill cutter studies have shown. So you could be under-dosing by a bit. Though even thats probably not a deal braker since dosing is all based on a response curve averaged across a population for effectiveness, and I doubt it is a super-minimum dose to start with.
And the converse is that the other half would have more than 50% Milb. I think research has shown that with the low toxicity on Milb. this should not be anything near a problem, by a factor of 100x.
For edifications sake, the only study I saw regarding toxicity of Millbemycin, which is more toxic than Lufenuron by far ( but still low nonetheless), related to herding dogs was for a Collie given 1600% the normal dose. I believe the results were minor short term neurological markers similar to those found in these puppies: http://www.fda.gov/AnimalVeterinary...lDrugProducts/FOIADrugSummaries/ucm054859.htm
My dog is 25# now, and the vet had no issue with giving me a 6-pack of 26-50# Sentinel. Assuming he tops out around 30-33, I see no reason from a dosing or product formulation for not splitting the 51-100# dose in 2 when I run out.
But thats for these drugs only, and since I've already email Novartis Animal Health for more information on their Sentinel manf. process.
