Determination of azosemide and its metabolite in plasma, blood, urine and tissue homogenates by high-performance liquid chromatography.

High-performance liquid chromatographic methods were developed for the determination of azosemide and its metabolite, M1, in human plasma and urine and rabbit blood and tissue homogenates. The methods involved deproteinization of the biological samples: 2.5 volumes of acetonitrile were used for the determination of azosemide and 1 volume of saturated Ba(OH)2 and ZnSO4 for that of M1. A 50-microliters aliquot of the supernatant was injected onto a C18 reversed-phase column in each instance. The mobile phases employed were 0.03 M phosphoric acid-acetonitrile (50:40, v/v) for azosemide and 0.03 M phosphoric acid/0.2 M acetic acid-acetonitrile (83:17, v/v) for M1. The flow-rate was 1.5 ml/min in both instances. The column effluent was monitored by ultraviolet detection at 240 and 236 nm for azosemide and M1, respectively. The retention times for azosemide and M1 were 6.0 and 8.3 min, respectively. The detection limits for both azosemide and M1 in both human plasma and urine were 50 ng/ml. The coefficients of variation of the assay were generally low (below 11.0%) for plasma, urine, blood and tissue homogenates. No interferences from endogenous substances or other diuretics tested were observed.