High-performance liquid chromatographic determination of anti- hypertensive drugs on dried blood spots using a fluorescence detector--method development and validation.

A selective and sensitive high-performance liquid chromatography method with fluorescence detection for simultaneous determination of irbesartan, losartan and valsartan on dried blood spots (DBS) has been developed and validated. It involves solvent extraction of a punch of DBS followed by reversed-phase liquid chromatography on a Lichrospher(®) 100 RP-18e column. Fluorescence detection was performed at 259 and 385 nm as excitation and emission wavelengths, respectively. The detection limits of irbesartan, losartan and valsartan were 1.8, 3.6 and 1.8 ng/mL respectively. The mean recoveries of irbesartan, losartan and valsartan were 98.68, 98.42 and 97.81%, respectively. The mean inter-day and intra-day precisions of irbesartan, losartan and valsartan were 2.07 and 1.34%, 1.42 and 1.48%, and 3.20 and 2.15% respectively. The proposed method was simple and rapid. Design of experiments was used to evaluate the robustness of the method.