Fast and accurate analysis of drugs using amperometry associated with flow injection analysis

This review presents a general overview about the amperometric detection potentialities associated to flow injection analysis (FIA). Fundamental aspects, developments, applications and advantages accrued from the coupling of voltammetry with FIA for pharmaceutical analyses are discussed. The selected references present several examples for this association in various classes of drugs and support their advantages. Examples illustrate that the amperometric techniques coupled with flow system can usually be used in drug routine analysis without sample pretreatment. Amperometry/FIA has proved to be an excellent alternative to the chromatographic techniques and it has been used in routine analysis, from the simplest analytes to more complex species, solving even special cases such as the enantiomeric analysis of pharmaceutical compounds with a chiral moiety, which requires time-consuming sample preparation or expensive instrumentation. This revision also aims to contribute for reducing the gap between the vast possibilities enabled by electroanalytical techniques and their effective utilization for pharmaceutical analysis.