A new high performance liquid chromatographic method for quantification of atomoxetine in human plasma and its application for pharmacokinetic study

Atomoxetine is the first, non-stimulant alternative to other stimulant medications used for the treatment of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Reported methods for the determination of atomoxetine include expensive liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LCMS) and high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with liquid scintillation counting (LSC) detection. Till date, no method has been reported in literature to determine atomoxetine using HPLC with UV detection. In this paper, we describe a new HPLC method for the determination of atomoxetine using liquid–liquid extraction with tertiary butyl methyl ether and UV detector. This method was found to be linear over the concentration range of 0.05–3.0 μg/ml. The limit of quantification was 0.05 μg/ml. Intra- and inter-day precision was <15% and accuracy was in the range of 95.67–108.80%. Stability studies showed that atomoxetine was stable in human plasma for short- and long-term period for sample preparation and analysis. This method was used for sample analysis in a pharmacokinetic study of atomoxetine (25 mg) in five healthy adult female volunteers. The observed mean ± S.D. pharmacokinetic parameters Cmax, Tmax and AUC0–t were 0.40 ± 0.06 μg/ml, 3.40 ± 0.42 h and 1.34 ± 0.52 μg h/ml, respectively.