Rapid Determination of Arsenic in Traditional Chinese Medicine by Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS)

Abstract

High arsenic (As) content in medicine may threaten health and its determination is necessary. However, traditional methods cannot achieve rapid analysis because of complex digestion procedures. Exploring rapid and accurate methods for the determination of As is urgent. In this study, the As concentration in niuhuangjiedu tablets (NHJDTs) was accurately and rapidly determined by laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS). Furthermore, comprehensive health risks of As were analyzed combined with solubility measurements to evaluate the impact on humans. The results showed that the relative standard deviation and relative error of the LIBS results were less than 10% for detection period of less than 0.3 h, which meets the requirements for rapid, accurate, and convenient As determination. The indices for non-carcinogenic and carcinogenic risk for total As and soluble As in niuhuangjiedu tablets were 966.67, 0.15, 4.37, and 6.72 × 10⁻⁴, respectively, indicating the presence of potential health risks. This work provided support for further investigation for quality control of pharmaceutical products.

Keywords:

• Arsenic
• laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS)
• pharmaceutical analysis
• traditional Chinese medicine

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the Analytical and Testing Center of Huazhong University of Science and Technology for ICP-OES measurements.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that influenced the work reported in this paper.

Additional information

Funding

This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Number 11874167) and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Number 2021M691151).