A simple and fast-portable method for the screening of the appetite-suppressant drug sibutramine in natural products and multivitamins supplements

Abstract

Sibutramine is one of the most widespread adulterants encountered in herbal formulations or dietary supplements used for weight-loss purposes. In this work, a simple and portable square-wave voltammetric (SWV) method was proposed for fast screening and quantification of sibutramine in herbal formulations and dietary supplements samples. The selective determination of sibutramine was possible using 0.1 mol L−1 H2SO4 solution as the supporting electrolyte and boron-doped diamond (BDD) as the working electrode. The screening of the samples is possible after a simple sample preparation procedure (dissolution in supporting electrolyte) and subsequent fast SWV scan with reliable indication of the presence or absence of sibutramine. Under optimized conditions, the determination of sibutramine is also possible with a linear working range from 5 to 50 mg L−1 (r > 0.99) and detection limits varying from 0.08 to 1.94 mg L−1 (depends on the type of sample). Moreover, it was demonstrated that the SWV developed method can be easily adapted to a portable batch-injection analysis (BIA) system aiming fast and on-site screening procedures.