Simultaneous determination of phenobarbital and phenytoin in tablet preparations by multivariate spectrophotometric calibration

The use of multivariate spectrophotometric calibration for the simultaneous determination of the active components of antiepileptic tablets is presented. The resolution of binary mixtures of phenobarbital and phenytoin has been accomplished by using partial least squares (PLS-1) regression analysis. Although the components show an important degree of spectral overlap, they have been simultaneously determined with high accuracy, with no interference from tablet excipients. A comparison is presented with the related multivariate method of classical least squares (CLS) analysis, which is shown to yield less reliable results due to the severe spectral overlap presented by the studied compounds. A statistical measure for the spectral overlap is proposed.