Simultaneous Determination of Seven Active Components in Desheng Pills by High-performance Liquid Chromatography

Background: Desheng pills (DSP) consist of six traditional Chinese medicine. This preparation is used fornourishing blood, eliminating stasis, soothing liver and regulating menstruation, and can also be used to treat menoxenia and dysmenorrhea caus ed by qi stagnation and blood stasis. Objective: In this paper, an accurate and sensitive high-performance liquid chromatography-diode array detector (HPLC-DAD) method was developed and validated for simultaneous determination of seven active components (gallic acid, paeoniflorin, costunolide, dehydrocostuslactone, rutin, leonurine hydrochloride and ferulic acid) in the traditional Chinese formula-Desheng pills. Methods: The seven analytes were separated on Agilent ZORBAX SB-C18 column (250mm× 4.6mm, 5μm) maintained at the temperature of 30. Gradient elution was performed with the mobile phase of methanol (A)-0.1% phosphoric acid solution (B) at the flow rate of 1.0mL·min-1. The analysis was carried out at the wavelength of 225 nm, 256 nm, 277 nm and 320 nm with an injection volume of 10 μL. Results: The measured seven components showed good linear relationships within their own concentration ranges along with coefficients of determination ≥0.9996. The limits of detection and quantitation of all analytes were in the range of 0.19-13.51 μg/mL and 0.59-40.93 μg/mL, respectively. Average recoveries ranged from 98.82% to 102.01% with RSDs of 1.47%-1.99%. The content of tested components was in the range of 0.053-0.421 mg/g. Conclusion: The proposed method was found to be sensitive, accurate and reproducible, which provided an effective quantitative analytical method for quality control of Desheng pills.