Simultaneous and interference-free determination of eleven non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs illegally added into Chinese patent drugs using chemometrics-assisted HPLC-DAD strategy

In this work, a smart strategy that combines three-way high performance liquid chromatography-diode array detection (HPLCDAD) data with second-order calibration method based on alternating trilinear decomposition (ATLD) algorithm was proposed for simultaneous determination of eleven non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) illegally added into Chinese patent drugs and health products. All target analytes were rapidly eluted out within 14.5 min under a simple gradient elution. With the aid of the prominent “second-order advantage” of the ATLD algorithm, three HPLC problems, i.e. peak overlaps, unknown interferences and baseline drift, could be mathematically calibrated, and pure signals of target analytes could be extracted out from heavy-interference but information-rich HPLC-DAD data. The average spiked recoveries for all target analytes were in the range of 95.9%–106.4% with standard deviations lower than 7.5%. Validation parameters including sensitivity (SEN), selectivity (SEL), limit of detection (LOD), limit of quantitation (LOQ) and precisions of intra-day and inter-day were calculated to validate the accuracy of the proposed method, quantitative results were further confirmed by the classic HPLC method, which proved that chemometrics-assisted HPLC-DAD analytical strategy was highly efficient, accurate and green for drug-abuse monitoring of NSAIDs in Chinese patent drugs and health products.