Spectrophotometric determination of certain cephalosporins using molybdophosphoric acid. Part II. Determination of cefadroxil, cefapirin, ceforanide and cefuroxime

The use of molybdophosphoric acid as an oxidising agent for the spectrophotometric determination of four cephalosporin derivatives, viz., cefadroxil monohydrate (I), cefapirin sodium (II), ceforanide L-lysine (III) and cefuroxime sodium (IV), either in the pure form or in pharmaceutical formulations is described. Beer's law is obeyed up to 100 micrograms ml-1 for I, up to 60 micrograms ml-1 for II and IV and up to 80 micrograms ml-1 for III. The molar absorptivities were 4.58 X 10(3), 11.3 X 10(3), 9.8 X 10(3) and 10.9 X 10(3) l mol-1 cm-1 and the Sandell sensitivities were 83.3, 39.3, 53.0 and 41.0 ng cm-2 for I, II, III and IV, respectively. The slopes and intercepts of the equations of the regression line were calculated for each of these drugs with the following correlation coefficients: I, 0.9993; II, 0.9999; III, 1.000; and IV, 0.9999. These antibiotics were determined successfully both in the pure form and in pharmaceutical preparations. The results demonstrated that the proposed procedure is at least as accurate, precise and reproducible as the official methods, while being simpler and less time consuming. A statistical analysis indicated that there was no significant difference between the results obtained by the proposed procedure and those of the official methods.