Determination of Diclofenac Sodium in Synovial Fluid by High Performance Liquid Chromatography

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Abstract
Due to the limited supply of blank synovial fluid, the usual practice of preparing a calibration curve for the biological sample of measuement is not practical for synovial fluid drug level determination. The linearity and correlation of peak height ratio between plasma and synovial fluid samples were investigated in this study. Excellent linear relationship is obtained from the calibration curves for both biological samples. In addition, excellent correlation of peak height ratios between plasma and synovial fluid indicates that the plasma calibration curve can be used in lieu of a synovial fluid calibration curve (slope 0.9154; intercept not statistically different than zero; and r = 0.999 with N = 13). According to this linear relationship, synovial fluid levels can be calculated based on the concentration as determined from the plasma calibration curve and divided by 0.9154. The extraction efficiences were comparable when diclofenac was spiked into human plasma or synovial fluid samples but the extraction of internal standard is better from synovial fluid than from plasma. The results are in good agreement with those observed in correlation between plasma and synovial fluid. Linearity and sensitivity of diclofenac in synovial fluid were determined in this study, but precision, accuracy and specificity were not determined due to the difficulty to obtain blank synovial fluid. Nevertheless, the same assay has been applied to plasma where all parameters have been well established and it is reasonable to assume the same results would have been obtained from synovial fluid samples.