Rapid determination of theophylline and antiepiletic drugs in serum by column-switching HPLC

Abstract

The rapid determination of theophylline and antiepileptic drugs(phenobarbital, carbamazepine, phenytoin and valproic acid) in human serum using a combination of a short pretreatment column(TSKprecolumn BSA-ODS/S) and a short analytical column(TSKgel Super-ODS) was investigated.Under the optimized analytical conditions, theophylline and four antiepileptic drugs were eluted within 14min.The relationship between the sample amount and the peak areas of five drugs indicated good linearity over the range from 1.0 to 500mg/l(valproic acid) and 0.2 to 110mg/l(other drugs), respectively.Five drugs from spiked serum were recovered quantitatively.The repeatability and reproducibility of the peak areas of standard and spiked serum were less than 1.6%.The drug concentrations in human serum determined by a enzyme immunoassay method and a column-switching method showed good agreement.Therefore, this column-switching method is very suitable for therapeutic drug monitoring(TDM) in biological fluids.