Simultaneous spectrophotometric determination of carbamazepine and phenytoin in serum by PLS regression and comparison with HPLC

Carbamazepine (CBZ) and phenytoin (PHT) are two antiepileptic drugs which are used simultaneously. In this paper a partial least-squares (PLS) calibration method is described for the simultaneous spectrophotometric determination of CBZ and PHT in plasma. Standard binary mixtures of CBZ and PHT have been resolved by application of PLS-1 to their UV spectra. Then, the binary standard solutions, spiked to plasma, were prepared and after the extraction of the drugs, their corresponding UV spectrum were analyzed by PLS regression to calculate the concentration of drugs in unknown plasma. A leave one out cross-validation procedure was employed to find the optimum numbers of latent variables using PRESS. A HPLC method was also applied for simultaneous determination of two drugs in the plasma and in methanol. The mean recoveries obtained by PLS were 98.4 and 98.2 for CBZ and PHT and those obtained by HPLC were 100.1 and 101.7, respectively. Although, the HPLC method showed better performance than PLS, it was found that the results obtained by PLS were comparable with those obtained by HPLC method.