Spectrophotometric Determination of Chloramphenicol in Pharmaceutical Preparations via Oxidative Coupling Reaction with Pyrocatechol

Abstract

A sensitive spectrophotometric method was proposed for the determination of chloramphenicol (CAP) in pharmaceutical preparations. The method was based on oxidative coupling organic reaction of reduced CAP with pyrocatechol in the presence of ferric sulfate to form red water soluble product with maximum absorbance at 500 nm. The reaction conditions were studied and optimized. The linear range for the determination of CAP, and the detection limit were 1 – 22 µg ml-1 and 0.520 µg ml-1, respectively. The proposed method has been applied successfully for the determination of CAP in pharmaceutical preparations. A statistical comparison of these results with those obtained by the British pharmacopoeia procedure using the Student t-test and variance ratio F-test shows a good agreement and indicates no significant difference in accuracy and precision at the 95% confidence