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Herpes simplex virus (HSV)-1 keratitis (HSK) is a sight-threatening ocular infection with worldwide occurrence. A prompt laboratory diagnosis is often very useful. The purpose of this study was to evaluate molecular methods as rapid diagnostic tools compared with cell culture of HSK. Corneal scrapings from patients with clinically suspected HSK were tested by direct immunofluorescence assay (IFA) for HSV-1 antigen and by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) for HSV-1 DNA, and an attempt for viral isolation was performed on Vero cell line culture. Positive samples by cell culture were 20.8%, whereas PCR was positive in 29.2%, and IFA was positive in 33.3%. IFA had better sensitivity (80%) and negative predictive value (81.8%) than PCR (70% and 76.9%, respectively); however, PCR had better specificity (71.4%) and positive predictive value (63.6%). This indicates that a combination of cell culture, IFA and PCR constitutes the best set of tools for diagnosis of clinically suspected cases of HSK. Documented infection can be further assessed by cell-culture technique or PCR depending laboratory availability.

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A highly sensitive, simple and rapid stability-indicating spectrofluorimetric method was developed for the determination of metolazone (MET) and xipamide (XPM) in their tablets. The proposed method is based on the measurement of the native fluorescence of MET in methanol at 437 nm after excitation at 238 nm and XPM in alkaline methanolic solution at 400 nm after excitation at 255 nm. The fluorescence-concentration plots were rectilinear over the range of 2.0- 20.0 ng/mL for MET and 0.2- 2.0 μg/mL for XPM, with lower detection limits (LOD) of 0.35 ng/mL and 0.02 μg/mL and a lower quantification limit (LOQ) of 1.05 ng/mL and 0.07 μg/mL for MET and XPM, respectively. The method was successfully applied to the analysis of MET and XPM in their commercial tablets and the results were in good agreement with those obtained using the official and comparison methods, respectively. Furthermore, content uniformity testing of the studied pharmaceutical tablets was also conducted. The application of the proposed method was extended to stability studies of MET and XPM after exposure to different forced degradation conditions, such as acidic, alkaline, oxidative and photolytic degradation conditions, according to ICH Guidelines. Moreover, the method was utilized to investigate the kinetics of the alkaline, acidic and photolytic degradation of MET. The apparent first-order rate constants and half-life times were calculated. Proposals for the degradation pathways for both MET and XPM were postulated.

A simple, sensitive and rapid spectrofluorimetric method for the simultaneous determination of metoclopramide (MET) and aspirin (ASP) was executed.