Simple high-performance liquid chromatographic assay for norethindrone--mestranol in combination tablets

A simple, sensitive, and specific high-performance liquid chromatographic procedure was developed to assay norethindrone--mestranol combination tablets. The method involves a chloroform extraction of a single pulverized tablet. After centrifugation, and aliquot of the supernate was injected into a modular high-performance liquid chromatograph. The effluent from the silica column was monitored serially with a fixed-wavelength UV detector (254 nm) for norethindrone quantitation and a fluorescence detector (230 nm for excitation and 280 nm cutoff filter for emission) for mestranol quantitation. Progesterone was used as an internal standard. The method was employed successfully in content uniformity studies of several brands of commercially available tablets.