Determination of β-blockers in pharmaceutical and human urine by capillary electrophoresis with electrochemiluminescence detection and studies on the pharmacokinetics

A novel method for simultaneous determination of atenolol, metoprolol and esmolol was proposed by capillary electrophoresis (CE) separation and electrochemiluminescence (ECL) detection. Poly-β-cyclodextrin (Poly-β-CD) was used as an additive in the running buffer to improve the separation of three analytes. The conditions for CE separation, ECL detection and effect of Poly-β-CD were investigated in detail. The three β-blockers with very similar structures were well separated and detected under the optimum conditions. The linear ranges of the standard solution for atenolol and esmolol were 2.5–125 μmol/L with a detection limit (S/N = 3) of 0.5 μmol/L, and for metoprolol was 0.5–25 μmol/L with a detection limit of 0.1 μmol/L. For three β-blockers from spiked aqueous and urine samples, the accuracy and precision including intraday and interday experiments were performed by calculating the recovery, the relative standard deviations of the ECL intensity and the migration time, respectively. The developed method was applied to the determination of metoprolol content in commercial pharmaceutical, and the analytical results are in good agreement with the nominal value with recoveries in the range of 98.7–105%. The proposed method was also applied to the monitoring of pharmacokinetics for metoprolol in human body.