Spectrophotometric determination of nicradipine and isradipine in pharmaceutical formulations

A sensitive spectrophotometric method was developed for the determination of some 1,4-dihydropyridine compounds namely, nicardipine and isradipine either in pure form or in pharmaceutical preparations. The method is based on the reduction of nicardipine and isradipine with zinc powder and calcium chloride followed by further reduction with sodium pentacyanoaminoferrate (II) to give violet and red products having the absorbance maximum at 546 and 539 nm with nicardipine and isradipine, respectively. Beer’s law was obeyed over the concentration range 8.0–180 μg/ml with the detection limit of 1.67 μg/ml for nicardipine and 8.0–110 μg/ml with the detection limit of 1.748 μg/ml for isradipine. The analytical parameters and their effects on the reported methods were investigated. The molar absorptivity, quantization limit, standard deviation of intercept (Sa), standard deviation of slope (Sb) and standard deviation of the residuals (Sy/x) were calculated. The composition of the result compounds were found 1:1 for nicardipine and 1:2 for isradipine by Job’s method and the conditional stability constant (Kf) and the free energy changes (ΔG) were calculated for compounds formed. The proposed method was applied successfully for the determination of nicardipine and isradipine in their dosage forms. The results obtained were in good agreement with those obtained using the reference or official methods. A proposal of the reaction pathway was presented