Vibrational analysis of acetaminophen from commercial tablets

Abstract

Acetaminophen (AAP) is an active ingredient very used in many pharmaceutical preparations. AAP is a pain reliever and a fever reducer drug. Generally, it is used to treat many conditions such as headache, muscle aches, arthritis, backache, toothaches, colds, and fevers. Standard methods most used for AAP chemical detection are based on chromatography and spectrophotometry techniques, these methods generally imply a sample preparation step, while vibrational spectroscopy based methods do not. Hence, analytical methods based on vibrational spectroscopy are very important for the pharmaceutical industry and law enforcement agency, given that allow obtain a way easy and fast molecular information for its detection. An effort for attaining a reliable identification procedure for the qualitative determination of AAP in different pharmaceuticals product, an additional statistical treatment of ATR-FTIR data is proposed. The proposed method was tested on solid samples containing API. The statistical routine of Hit Quality Index (HQI) values yielded excellent results. The results show that ATR-FTIR, QCL and Raman spectra are useful for detection of AAP in the drugs tested. Using the proposed method allowed to know if the drug is present as a desired product or it is counterfeit drugs.