1H nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy analysis for simultaneous determination of levodopa, carbidopa and methyldopa in human serum and pharmaceutical formulations

A method utilizing NMR spectroscopy has been developed to confirm the identity and quantity of levodopa, carbidopa and methyldopa in human serum and pharmaceutical preparations. The method is based on 500 MHz proton NMR spectra of individual catecholamine molecules. Qualitative and quantitative analyses are based on resonance characteristics of the functional groups present in their structures and the integral ratio of selected signals belonging to different compounds with respect to those of an internal standard, respectively. Experiments are performed to validate the quantitative NMR method, and the linearity and reproducibility of the proposed method are verified. The detection limit of the proposed method was estimated as 4.2, 1.7 and 1.6 mug ml(-1) for levodopa, carbidopa and methyldopa, respectively. The recovery studies performed on human serum samples ranged from about 82-96% with relative standard deviations of <4%. The method was also applied successfully to the determination of each active compound in real pharmaceutical samples, and compared with the results obtained by the reference methods. The method is rapid, precise, accurate, and suitable for routine analyses. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.