Liquid chromatographic determination of carbamazepine in tablets

A simple and rapid liquid chromatographic method is described for the qualitative and quantitative determination of carbamazepine in tablet composites and individual tablets, using the internal standard technique. Analyses were performed on a C-18 reverse-phase column with tetrahydrofuran-methanol-water (8 + 37 + 55) as the mobile phase. A linear relationship was obtained between detector responses at 254 nm and amounts of carbamazepine injected ranging from 0.2 to 1.7 micrograms. The coefficient of variation for 10 consecutive injections of a standard preparation was 0.4%. Recoveries of carbamazepine from 100 and 200 mg tablets averaged 101.4 and 99.7%, respectively. Assay results for commercial tablets analyzed by the proposed method agreed favorably with those obtained by the method of USP XXI. The assay results for individual tablets indicated that deviations from the average value and the range of individual values are much wider with the compendial method than with the proposed method.