Separation and determination of theophylline from paraxanthine in human serum by reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography.

A sensitive and highly specific method for the determination of theophylline in serum by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) has been developed. Theophylline was completely separated from paraxanthine, a major metabolite of caffeine which has been known to interfere with most isocratic reversed-phase HPLC methods, with a mixture of acetonitrile/tetrahydrofuran/acetate buffer (10 mM, pH 5.0; 5:1:94, v/v %) as the mobile phase using a C18 bonded reversed-phase column. Neither the other xanthine and uric acid derivatives nor numerous drugs tested were found to interfere. The proposed method was applied to therapeutic monitoring utilizing its excellent precision, reproducibility and high specificity for theophylline.