Determination of micro and macro elements in iron supplements used for treatment of anemia and evaluation employing chemometric analysis tools

This paper propose a method using inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry (ICP OES) for the determination of Ca, K, Mg, Mn, Na, P and Zn in iron supplement used for the treatment of anemia and evaluation of the results by chemometric analysis tools, principal component analysis (PCA) and hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA). Sample preparation was performed by acid digestion using 3.0 mL of HNO3 and 1.0 mL of H2O2 (30% v/v). Limits of quantification (mg L-1) were 0.52 for Ca, 0.14 for K, 0.03 for Mg, 0.07 for Mn, 0.40 for Na, 0.36 for P and 0.24 for Zn, showing that the method is sensitive for the determination of elements. There is no certified reference material of ferrous supplement for evaluation of the accuracy. Thus, addition/recovery tests were performed to evaluate the accuracy of the method. The recovery values achieved varied from 89.75 to 114.97%, confirming the applicability of this method for quantification of the mentioned elements in these iron supplements. The method proposed was applied for determination of Ca, K, Mg, Mn, Na, P and Zn in seventeen iron supplement samples with different chemical composition. All results were evaluated by multivariate analysis tools, which have the ability to characterize the samples by chemical composition and the analyte content. Some samples showed higher values for some metals, indicating the importance of specific legislation also for these metals.