Development of a method using high‐performance liquid chromatographic fingerprint and multi‐ingredients quantitative analysis for the quality control of Yangxinshi Pian

A simple and reliable method of high‐performance liquid chromatography with diode array detection method was developed for fingerprint analysis and simultaneous determination of six compounds including puerarin, salvianolic acid B, berberine hydrochloride, palmatine chloride, dehydrocorydaline, and icariin in the Chinese medicine preparation Yangxinshi Pian. The separation was performed on an Agilent Eclipse XDB‐C₁₈ reserved‐phase column (250 mm × 4.6mm I.D., 5 μm) using gradient elution with 50 mmol/L monopotassium phosphate aqueous solution and methanol as mobile phase at a flow rate of 1.0 mL/min. The column operating temperature was set at 30°C, and the detection wavelength was 280 nm. The method was validated by linearity, precision, accuracy, stability, and recovery. For fingerprint analysis, 25 peaks were selected as the common peaks, and four kinds of similarities including cosine similarity (S), ratio of similarity (S′), projection content similarity (C), and content similarity (P) were applied to evaluate the quality consistency of different batches of Yangxinshi Pian. The results showed that the developed method was an efficient tool for quality evaluation of Yangxinshi Pian.