Abstract

Background: Tamsulosin is used for the treatment of difficult urination, a common symptom of an enlarged prostate.

Objective: In the present paper, for the first time a microextraction technique was introduced for the detection and determination of tamsulosin in urine and plasma samples.

Method: Procedure for extraction of tamsulosin consists of hollow ber based liquid phase microextraction (HF-LPME) followed by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) coupled with ultraviolet (UV) detection. The organic liquid membrane consists of 1-Octanol immobilized in the pores of a hollow fiber. A pH gradient was applied to migrate analytes from the sample solution with pH 10.5, through the organic liquid membrane into an acidic acceptor solution with pH 3.0 which was located inside the lumen of hollow fiber.

Results: Extraction recoveries greater than 80% were obtained in different biological matrices which resulted in preconcentration factors greater than 102 and acceptable repeatability (2.5 < RSD% <3.5).

Conclusion: The method offers good linearity with estimation of coefficacy higher than 0.9990. Finally, it was applied for the determination and quantification of tamsulosin in human plasma and urine samples.

Keywords: Tamsulosin, high performance liquid chromatography, hollow ber based liquid phase microextraction, Microextraction.

Graphical Abstract