Abstract

Background: Dopamine agonists are useful drugs for the management of patients with Parkinson's disease in the early and later stages of the disease. Parkinson's disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that primarily affects dopamine-producing nerve cells in the brain. They bind to dopamine receptors in nerve cells that regulate body movement and motor function. Electroanalytical methods are used in medicinal, clinical and pharmaceutical research. Voltammetry is one of the most commonly used electroanalytical methods. This review aims to gather and discuss studies of voltammetric methods used in determination of dopamine agonists.

Methods: This review includes the use of various voltammetric methods for determination studies of dopamine agonists from pharmaceutical dosage forms and biological samples. These studies were examined in terms of used voltammetric method or methods, working electrode, buffer, pH and validation parameters.

Results: Cabergoline, pramipexole, and ropinirole have more studies, while bromocriptine and apomorphine have fewer studies in the literature. Differential pulse voltammetry and square wave voltammetry methods were the most applied methods for the determination of dopamine agonist drugs from pharmaceuticals and biological samples. But, stripping, cyclic and linear sweep voltammetry methods are less applied methods. In these studies, a lot of modified electrodes were developed and used to analyse dopamine agonists.

Conclusion: The voltammetric methods provide the determination of therapeutic agents and/or their metabolites in clinical samples at extremely low concentrations without the necessity for the sample pre-treatment or time consuming extraction steps. Also, the modified electrodes and validated voltammetric methods provide good stability, repeatability, reproducibility and high recovery for the analysis of the analyte.

Keywords: Apomorphine, bromocriptine, cabergoline, determination, dopamine agonists, pramipexole, ropinirole, validation, voltammetric methods.

Graphical Abstract