High-performance liquid chromatographic determination of acetylcholine in a pharmaceutical preparation

A simple and rapid method for quantitating acetylcholine in a lyophilized preparation by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) is described. A reverse-phase column with a refractive index detector was utilized for the assay. The HPLC system was able to separate acetylcholine from choline, a major degradation product, which was verified by running a degraded sample of a commercial preparation. The HPLC results were compared with the results obtained by a spectrophotometric procedure.