Determination of the antibiotic drug pefloxacin in bulk form, tablets and human serum using square wave cathodic adsorptive stripping voltammetry

A simple, rapid, reliable and fully validated square wave cathodic adsorptive stripping voltammetric procedure has been developed for the determination of the antibiotic pefloxacin drug in bulk form, tablets and human serum, based on its electrochemical reduction at a hanging mercury drop electrode. The Britton-Robinson buffer of pH 7.0 was found to be reasonable as a supporting electrolyte for assay of the drug. Pefloxacin drug, at the optimized conditions, showed a single 2-electron well-defined peak at - 1.07 V (versus Ag/AgCl/KCls,) using an accumulation potential of - 0.40 V. This peak may be attributed to the reduction of the C=O group. A mean recovery of 99.54% +/- 0.23 and a detection limit of 1.65 x 10(-10) M pefloxacin were achieved. After being validated, the proposed procedure was successfully applied for the determination of the drug in tablets and human serum with mean recoveries of 99.57+/-0.48 and 98.55+/-0.78%, respectively. A detection limit of 4.50 x 10(-10) M was achieved for the determination of the drug in human serum. Results of the proposed procedure were comparable with those obtained by reported methods. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.