Spectrophotometric determination of hydrocortisone, nystatin and oxytetracycline in synthetic and pharmaceutical preparations based on various univariate and multivariate methods

Two spectrophotometric methods are described and applied to resolve ternary mixtures of the corticosteroid hydrocortisone (HYD) and the antibiotics nystatin (NYS) and oxytetracycline (OXY). The simultaneous determination of these three compounds was firstly accomplished by a derivative method using the “ratio spectrum-zero crossing derivative” and then by multivariate methods partial least squares (PLS)-1, -2 and principal component regression (PCR). Multivariate calibration methods provide, specially PLS-2 in this case, a clear example of the high resolving powder of these techniques. The two described procedures do not require any separation step. Repeatability and reproducibility studies were achieved over two series of 10 standards for each compound showing no significant differences at 95% confidence level in the four spectrophotometric methods. A comparison of the derivative and multivariate calibration results obtained in pharmaceutical formulations was performed resulting in agreement of the values obtained and the results was confirm by a high-pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC) method. © 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.