High-performance liquid chromatographic determination of dehydroabietic and abietic acids in traditional Chinese medications

In Asia, there is still a high usage of traditional Chinese medicament by the general population. Some patients with contact dermatitis to these medicaments have been found to be sensitive to colophony on patch testing. Dehydroabietic acid (DHAA) and abietic acid (AA) are the main components of colophony and believed to be the agents responsible for skin sensitization. This paper describes a reliable high-performance liquid-chromatographic method for determining these two resin acids in ointment samples. The samples were either pretreated with diethyl ether or treated with acetonitrile directly by ultrasonication for 30 min. One volume of this sample was added to an equal volume of water and purified by solid-phase extraction. The mobile phase used was methanol-water-phosphoric acid (87:13:0.02, v/v) and the flow-rate was 1 ml/min. DHAA and AA were detected at 4.3 and 6.3 min with ultraviolet detection at wavelength 200 and 239 nm, respectively. However, fluorimetric detection with an excitation wavelength of 225 nm and emission wavelength of 285 nm, provided more selective determination of DHAA. The detection limits for DHAA and AA were 1 ng. Analytical recovery generally exceeded 90%. We analyzed nine types of commonly used topical Chinese medicaments and two types of Western medical ointments in Singapore. The results showed that most of these medicaments contain colophony below 5 ppm (mu g g(-1)). Only one Chinese medicament contained >70 ppm of both allergens and one of the Western medical ointments contained 0.2% of DHAA and 2.2% of AA.