Determination of Betamethasone and Dexamethasone in Human Urine and Serum by MEKC After an Experimental Design

Abstract

A simple and reliable micellar electrokinetic capillary chromatography method has been presented for the simultaneous determination of betamethasone (BM) and its epimer dexamethasone (DM) in human urine and serum. A three level full factorial experimental design was employed to search for the optimum conditions. Rapid and baseline separation of BM and DM was obtained within 7 min with the optimum conditions of 30 mM borax buffer, 30 mM sodium dodecyl sulfate at pH 10.0, separation voltage at 18 kV, injection time 15 s at a height of 10 cm, using sodium sorbate as internal standard. The proposed method was validated with respect to stability, precision, linearity and accuracy. Good relationship between peak area ratio and analyte concentration was linear over 30–1,000 µg mL−1 for BM and DM with correlation coefficients ≥0.9993. Relative standard deviations of the method were all less than 4.50% in the intra-day and inter-day analysis. The developed method was applied to assay spiked human urine and serum samples containing both compounds with recoveries in the range of 97.5–100.5%.