Screening of domperidone in wastewater by high performance liquid chromatography and solid phase extraction methods

Domperidone is a dopamine D(2) receptor antagonist, which has been used as antiemetic agent in human beings. It has been found in wastewater released by some pharmaceutical industries leading to the contamination of surface and ground water. Therefore, a sensitive, inexpensive and reproducible HPLC-SPE method was developed for the analysis of domperidone in the wastewater. The column used was Waters symmetry C(18) (15 cm x 0.46 mm, 5 microm). The mobile phase used was phosphate buffer (50mM, pH 3.5) acetonitrile (80:20, v/v) at the flow rate 2.0 mL/min. The detection was achieved by using UV mode at 230 nm. The retention, separation and resolution factors were 2.63, 3.00 and 3.20, respectively. The percentage recovery of domperidone from wastewater was 95.0%. Celiprolol was used as the internal standard to access the percentage extraction of domperidone from wastewater.