An HPLC Method for detection of Anti-inflammatory Drugs in Bone and Cartilage health supplements

Many bone-building and cartilage repair supplements are available in the market and, many people especially the elderly people use these supplements. Manufacturers claim various therapeutic properties for these types of supplements. Therefore, it is likely that these products are included with chemical and anti-inflammatory drugs that are not listed in labels and brochures. There is not reported using HPLC method to check for chemical and anti-inflammatory drugs in bone and cartilage supplements, by the competent authorities. In this research, a valid, simple, affordable and selective method launched to quantify and identify some corticosteroids in bone and cartilage supplements. This method involves the extraction of the case from supplements using ethanol and injection directly to high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). The effect of different variables such as mobile phase, column type, pH and other variables was investigated. Optimum conditions including water-acetonitrile mobile phase with a ratio of 55: 45, ODS column, column temperature of 25°C, injection volume of 20 microliters, detector wavelength of 254 nm and the mobile phase flow rate 1ml/min were obtained. With this HPLC analysis method, cartilage repair products and bone-building supplements can be simply analyzed and the proportion of infected or free corticosteroids can also be identified.