Capillary zone electrophoresis as a quality assessment tool of paracetamol and phenylephrine hydrochloride in presence of paracetamol impurities.

The combination of paracetamol (PAR) and phenylephrine HCl (PHE) is a common pharmaceutical combination intended to manage symptoms of every day cold. Since paracetamol is susceptible to degradation or some manufacturing-related impurities, its stability should be monitored continuously. The developed method in this study for the determination of PAR and PHE in presence of PAR impurities is considered a quality assessment tool especially when PAR impurities can be quantitatively determined. A capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE) method was optimized and validated for simultaneous determination of PAR and PHE in presence of PAR impurities namely, p-Aminophenol (PAP), p-Nitrophenol (PNP), Acetanilide (ACT) and p-Chloroacetanilide (CAC) with further quantification of these toxic impurities. Factors that affect the separation quality such as pH, buffer and applied voltage were optimized. The separation was carried out using 20 mM phosphate buffer (pH 8). The linearity was reached over concentration ranges of 30-250 μg/mL, 1-40 μg/mL, 2-50 μg/mL, 2-50 μg/mL, 2-50 μg/mL and 2-50 μg/mL for PAR, PHE, PAP, PNP, ACT, and CAC, respectively, with accuracy ranging from 99.06% to 100.62%. After validation, the method was applied for pharmaceutical formulation analysis with RSD <2%. Moreover, statistical comparison with the official methods confirms that the method is a viable alternative for quality assessment of this combination.