Electrochemical Behavior and Square-Wave Stripping Voltammetric Determination of Roflumilast in Pharmaceutical Dosage Forms

Background: Bronchial asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are among the most common chronic diseases. Roflumilast is a novel, potent, selective, and long-acting phosphodiesterase 4 (PDE-4) inhibitor for the treatment of bronchial asthma and COPD. It has anti-inflammatory effects, and it has been shown to reduce exacerbations and improve pulmonary function in patients with COPD. Although there have been some other analytical methodologies reported for the determination of roflumilast in pharmaceutical dosage forms, there has not yet been any electrochemical methodology proposed for determination of this unique active pharmaceutical ingredient in its dosage forms. Objective: The aim of this study was to develop an easily applied, selective, sensitive, accurate, and precise square-wave stripping voltammetric (SWSV) method for the determination of roflumilast in its pharmaceutical dosage forms. In addition, the electrochemical behavior of roflumilast was investigated. Methods: The proposed method was based on electrochemical reduction of roflumilast at a hanging mercury drop electrode (HMDE) in 0.1 M K2HPO4 and 0.1 M Na2B4O7 (1: 1, v/v) buffer at pH 5.0. Two reduction peaks were observed at -1150 mV and -1260 mV with 30 s of accumulation time and -850 mV of accumulation potential time versus Ag/AgCl reference electrode. Results: The highest peak current values with the best peak definition were observed at a frequency of 50 Hz, scan increment of 5 mV, and pulse amplitude 25 mV. The proposed method was validated by evaluating validation parameters such as linearity, sensitivity, repeatability, accuracy, precision, selectivity, recovery, robustness, and ruggedness. A good linear correlation (r=0.9948) was obtained between the electrochemical response of roflumilast and its concentration in the range of 0.74-3.05 mu g mL(-1) under the optimum conditions. The obtained accuracy results were between 2.04% and -2.04% while the relative standard deviation of the results was at least 2.78% for intraday and inter-day studies. The mean recovery for the real applications was 100.63% +/- 0.52. The electrochemical behavior of roflumilast was investigated by cyclic voltammetry. The cyclic voltam-mogram of roflumilast exhibited two peaks and the reduction reaction was reversible. Conclusion: This developed and validated SWSV method was applied successfully for the determination of roflumilast in tablet dosage form (Daxas (R)) to assess active roflumilast content. Since high-performance liquid chromatography is a dominant technique in industry for quality control of active pharmaceutical ingredients, the finding in the present study demonstrated that square- wave stripping voltammetry could be easily utilized in routine applications to determine roflumilast content in its dosage forms.