Resolution of Ternary and Quaternary Mixtures of Drugs in Pharmaceutical Preparations by Use of Spectrophotometric Data in Conjunction with PLS-1 and PLS-2 Data Processing Methods

Abstract

Two variants of partial least-squares methodology (PLS-1 and PLS-2) have been used for the analysis of ternary and quaternary mixtures of acetaminophen-acetylsalicylic acid-codeine and caffeine, respectively. This methodology permits the simultaneous quantification of the aforementioned drugs even with closely overlapping spectral bands without any separation step. The concentration ranges are 4.0–12.0, 0.2–1.0 and 4.0–12.0 μg·ml⁻¹ for acetaminophen-acetylsalicylic acid-codeine and 10.0–20.0, 6.0–16.0, 1.0–5.0 and 0.2–1.0 μg·ml⁻¹ for acetaminophen-acetylsalicylic acid-caffeine and codeine, respectively. A systematic study of the experimental data by applying an exhaustive statistical analysis to demostrate the validity of the proposed methods is presented. The results of the determination of these drugs in pharmaceutical preparations are also presented. The analytical results were quite good in all cases.

Keywords:

• acetylsalicylic acid
• acetaminophen
• caffeine
• codeine
• partial least squares method
• spectrophotometry
• pharmaceutical preparation