Chronotherapy

ABSTRACTChronotherapy refers to the use of circadian, ultradian, infradian & seasonal or other rhythmic cycles in the application of therapy. There are number of conditions which show a circadian pattern and advantage could be taken by timing and adjusting the administration of drugs according to the circadian rhythm of the disease. Some of the conditions, which may be significantly benefited, are hypertension, myocardial infarction, bronchial asthma, peptic ulcer, arthritis, duodenal ulcer, diabetes, neurological disorder, cancer and hypercholesterolemia. Chronotherapy can be classified into time controlled systems wherein the drug release is controlled primarily by the delivery system, stimuli induced PDDS in which release is controlled by the stimuli, such as the pH or enzymes present in the intestinal tract or enzymes present in the drug delivery system and externally regulated system where release is programmed by external stimuli like magnetism, ultrasound, electrical effect and irradiation.Keywords: Chronotherapy, Circadian Rhythm, Chrono pharmaceutics, Time Dependent Release, circadian clock, Chrono therapeutics.  

In general, as a subclass of epilepsy, nocturnal epilepsy intensify one of the major problems of epilepsy as it is less likely witnessed than daytime epilepsy and therefore it is very difficult to diagnose and characterize and this results in sleep disruption which can cause daytime somnolence and concentration difficulty. So, the present research work was aimed to formulate a programmable pulsatile press coated tablets of levetiracetam inorder to achieve chronotherapy for nocturnal epilepsy. The core tablets containing levetiracetam were prepared by direct compression method and press coated with HPMC K100M and MCC. The prepared pulsatile tablets were evaluated for in-vitro release to get desirable pulsatile release of drug after a lag time of 2.5 h. Drug-excipients compatibility study by IR spectrophotometer showed that all the excipients were compatible with the drug. The stability study was carried out for the desired optimized formulation for a period of 3months and showed insignificant difference.