Determination of triamcinolone acetonide in pharmaceutical formulation and human serum by adsorptive cathodic stripping voltammetry

Electrochemical behavior of triamcinolone acetonide (TAA) has been studied by cyclic voltammetry at a hanging mercury drop electrode in universal buffers of pH 2-11. Due to the interfacial adsorption oftriamcinolone acetonide onto the mercury surface, a fully validated square-wave adsorptive cathodic stripping voltammetric procedure was developed for its determination in the bulk form. Under optimized conditions, the stripping voltammetric peak current of triamcinolone acetonide showed a linear dependence on TAA concentration over the range 1 × 10 -9 -9 × 10 -8 mol L -1 . The mean percentage recovery of TAA was 99.84 ± 0.64, the detection limit (LOD) was 3 × 10 -10 mol L -1 , and the quantitation limit (LOQ) equaled 1 × 10 -9 mol L -1 . The proposed procedure was successfully applied in the determination of triamcinolone acetonide in Kenacort® tablets and in human serum spiked with TAA without any pretreatment and/or time-consuming extractions prior to the analysis. LOD and LOQ corresponding to the determination of triamcinolone acetonide in spiked human serum were 7.5 x 10 -10 mol L -1 and 2.5 x 10 -9 mol L -1 , respectively.