Spectrophotometric, spectrofluorimetric, HPLC and CZE determination of mirtazapine in pharmaceutical tablets

Four analytical methods have been developed for the quality control of tablets containing mirtazapine: spectrophotometry, spectrofluorimetry, high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE). All the methods only require a simple extraction procedure of mirtazapine from the tablets before analysis. The concentration of mirtazapine in solutions was determined in the linearity range of 5-25 mug/ml at = 315 nm for spectrophotometry and at lambda = 220 nm for HPLC and CZE. Spectrofluorimetric determinations were achieved at lambda(excitation) = 328 nm and lambda(emission) = 415 nm in the linearity range of 2-25 ng/ml. All the methods gave similar results and were validated for selectivity, linearity, precision and sensitivity. Spectrometric methods gave slightly higher RSD values (up to 2.54%). The four methods were directly and easily applied to the pharmaceutical preparation with accuracy, resulting from recovery experiments between 99.72% in HPLC and 101.47% in spectrofluorimetry. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.