Spectrofluorimetric investigation with green analytical procedures for estimation of bambuterol and terbutaline: Application to pharmaceutical dosage forms and content uniformity testing

Bambuterol (BAM) and terbultaline (TER) are well known and effective bronchodilators. In this article highly sensitive, green and cost-effective spectrofluorimetric methods are designed to determine low concentrations of such drugs. The proposed methods are based on an investigation of the native fluorescence properties of aqueous solutions of BAM at 298 nm after excitation at 263 nm and of TER at 313 nm after excitation at 275 nm. Under optimum conditions, the plots of the relative fluorescence intensity versus concentration were rectilinear over the range 0.1–1.2 μg/mL for BAM and 0.05–0.5 μg/mL for TER with a limit of quantitation of 0.067 μg/mL for BAM and 0.018 μg/mL for TER. The methods are simple and hence suitable for application to the quantification of BAM and TER in syrups and tablets without interference from common excipients. Furthermore, based on United States Pharmacopeia (USP) guidelines, the application was extended to determine the content uniformity of the cited drugs in low dose tablets. The developed methods were fully validated according to the guidelines of the International Conference on Harmonization (ICH).