High performance liquid chromatography as tool for quality control of cis-permethrin in hair lotion.

Abstract

Parasitic skin diseases such as scabies, pediculosis, tungiasis, and cutaneous larva migrans are epidemic in numerous communities in Brazil and its effective control is a major challenge to public health. Permethrim is one of the medications approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat pediculosis. However, official methods of quality control for permethrin’s use as hair lotion are currently unavailable. Thus, a specific and accurate method was validated using high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with a diode array detector (wavelength = 235 nm) in order to determine cis-permethrin in hair lotion, aiming to establish a system of quality control in analytical laboratories. Cis-permethrin and naphazoline chloride (internal standard - IS) were separated in an analytical S5W column (4.6 x 150 mm) Waters Spherisorb® and isocratically eluted (flow rate =1.2 mL/min). Cis-permethrin and IS were characterized by their retention times: 1.52 and 8.66 minutes, respectively. The accuracy of this method was 103%. A linear range was detected from 1.6 to 127.5 μg/ml and CV < 5% calculated from intra and inter-essay precision results. LOD and LOQ were 1.6 μg/mL and 2.4 μg/mL, respectively. Cis-permethrin remained stable for 24 hours at room temperature; for 15 days at 4ºC and 30 days at -20ºC. The method was considered simple and suitable for determination of cis-permethrin in hair lotion.