Simultaneous determination of nine acetylcholinesterase inhibitors using micellar electrokinetic chromatography.

MEKC was used for the separation of nine acetylcholinesterase inhibitors (AChEIs). AChEIs are an important group of drug compounds that are used medicinally to treat Alzheimer's disease and Myasthenia Gravis. At the time of the experiment, this is the first time that nine AChEIs are used simultaneously in a study. Several chromatographic parameters, such as buffer concentration, pH, surfactants and their concentration, background electrolyte composition, etc., were evaluated to optimize the separation. The optimum separation of the nine AChEIs was achieved in less than 15 min by using 12.5 mM Na(2)HPO(4), 12.5 mM Na(2)B(4)O(7) and 20 mM SDS at pH 10, an applied voltage of 30 kV and a temperature of 25 °C. The reproducibility of the method was also evaluated by computing the RSDs of the migration times and the areas of the nine analyte-peaks, and the migration time and the area of the peak that corresponds to rivastigmine added in the blood sample. The RSD values of the migration times and the peak areas were less than 2% and 6%, respectively, in most cases. The limits of detection and quantification were 0.5 μg/mL and 1.7 μg/mL, respectively. The MEKC method developed was applied to a real blood sample that was obtained from a patient who was not under any of this medication. The sample was spiked with rivastigmine in order to establish the ability of the method to separate the drug from other components that might exist in the blood sample.