Investigation of different spectrophotometric and chemometric methods for determination of entacapone, levodopa and carbidopa in ternary mixture.

New, simple, accurate and sensitive UV spectrophotometric and chemometric methods have been developed and validated for determination of Entacapone (ENT), Levodopa (LD) and Carbidopa (CD) in ternary mixture. Method A is a derivative ratio spectra zero-crossing spectrophotometric method which allows the determination of ENT in the presence of both LD and CD by measuring the peak amplitude at 249.9nm in the range of 1-20μgmL-1. Method B is a double divisor-first derivative of ratio spectra method, used for determination of ENT, LD and CD at 245, 239 and 293nm, respectively. Method C is a mean centering of ratio spectra which allows their determination at 241, 241.6 and 257.1nm, respectively. Methods B and C could successfully determine the studied drugs in concentration ranges of 1-20μgmL-1 for ENT and 10-90μgmL-1 for both LD and CD. Methods D and E are principal component regression and partial least-squares, respectively, used for the simultaneous determination of the studied drugs by using seventeen mixtures as calibration set and eight mixtures as validation set. The developed methods have the advantage of simultaneous determination of the cited components without any pre-treatment. All the results were statistically compared with the reported methods, where no significant difference was observed. The developed methods were satisfactorily applied to the analysis of the investigated drugs in their pure form and in pharmaceutical dosage forms.