Spectrophotometric multicomponent analysis of a mixture of metamizol, acetaminophen and caffeine in pharmaceutical formulations by two chemometric techniques.

Inverse least squares (ILS) and factor-based (principal component analysis (PCA)) techniques were proposed for the spectrophotometric multicomponent analysis of a ternary mixture consisting of metamizol, acetaminophen and caffeine, without prior separation. In these chemometric techniques, the measurements of the absorbance values were realized in the spectral range from 225 to 285 nm in the intervals of Deltalambda=5 nm at the 13 wavelengths in the zero-order spectra of the different ternary mixtures of these active ingredients in 0.1 M HCl. The prepared calibrations of both techniques using the absorbance data and concentration matrix data sets were used to predict the concentration of the unknown concentrations of metamizol acetaminophen and caffeine in their ternary mixture. The 'MAPLE V' software was used for the numerical calculations. Mean recoveries and relative standard deviations for ILS and PCA techniques were found to be 99.8 and 1.68%, 99.9 and 1.66% for caffeine, 99.8 and 1.84%, 100.4 and 2.85% for metamizol, and 99.7 and 1.04%, 99.6 and 1.34% for acetaminophen, respectively, for the first and second techniques. The techniques were successfully applied to two pharmaceutical formulations marketed in Turkey and results were compared with a new high-performance liquid chromatography method.