Objective:
The objective of this study is to develop and validate a routine screening test
for the determination of three common antipyretic-analgesic synthetic drugs (paracetamol, ibuprofen,
and aspirin) adulteration in herbal products using Attenuated Total Reflectance Fourier Transform
Infrared (ATR-FTIR) coupled with chemometric method.
Method:
ATR-FTIR spectra of sixteen testing sets of herbal product samples for pain and fever indications
were used for multivariate chemometrics model construction. Linear Discriminant Analysis
(LDA) was selected as a method for model construction with IBM SPSS for statistical analysis.
Model development employed feature selection, such as the stepwise method for variable selection.
The model with a high %correct classification and cross-validation was selected and was
then validated with an independent testing data set with an auto-prediction test, confusion matrix,
and Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve. To validate the developed test for routine
use, the result from ATR-FTIR method was compared with the standard HPLC and TLC analyses
used for adulteration screening.
objective:
Creating validated screening tools for herbal products adulterated with three common antipyretic-analgesic synthetic drugs (Paracetamol, Ibuprofen, and Aspirin) using ATR-FTIR couple with chemometric method
Results:
The selected model's overall %correct classification result was 97.7%, with a cross-validation
of 93.8% rate in training set samples. External validation with an independent testing dataset
gave an overall correct classification of 93.8%, with an area under the curve of ROC at
0.979. Comparative testing revealed that model performance was comparable with the HPLC and
TLC methods, which routinely detect the presence of paracetamol, aspirin, and ibuprofen. The results
of testing set samples classification were consistent with training set samples.
Conclusion:
Against the standard chromatographic methods, the multivariate chemometric model
based on ATR-FTIR demonstrates comparable detection capability to determine adulteration of
paracetamol, ibuprofen, and aspirin in herbal products.