Indian squill (Urgenia indica) is used as a cardiotonic, hair tonic and as a remedy for cancer. It has high content of mucilage which may be of pharmaceutical significance. There are many plant sourced drugs which also act as pharmaceutical adjuvants. This study was undertaken to isolate the mucilage as well as to characterize and to investigate the properties of mucilage of Urginea indica in various concentrations as disintegrant for tablet formulation containing tramadol hydrochloride as active ingredient. The mucilage from bulbs of Urginea indica was separated by an acetone precipitation method. The separated mucilage was evaluated for physicochemical characteristics such as color, solubility, swelling index, compressibility index etc. Tablets of tramadol hydrochloride were prepared by direct compression using directly compressible Avicel 102 as diluents along with different proportions of mucilage of plant Urginea indica as a disintegrant. These tablets were compared with the standard disintegrant, starch. The percentage yield of the mucilage of Urginea indica was 4%. The physicochemical parameters showed the results indicating the suitability of mucilage to be used as tablet excipient. The dissolution profile was significantly affected by the choice of the disintegrant. All formulations containing Urginea indica mucilage as disintegrant showed more than 90% drug release at 10 min whilst formulations containing starch as disintegrant showed significantly less release in this time period. Thus, this mucilage could be used as a very good natural disintegrant in comparison to costly synthetic disintegrant. A concentration of 7.5% mucilage gave the least disintegration time (20 second) compared to the starch.
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