ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to cover in depth the liquid chromatography (LC) determinations of the more important antibiotics and to extract some general principles. LC has proven to be widely applicable to the determination of antibiotics in body fluids. Workable LC methods have been reported for all but a few of the clinically important antibiotics. While considering the clinical laboratory use of LC for the determination of blood levels of antibiotics, it is important to note that the vast majority of such assays are currently performed by microbiological assay, radioimmunoassay, or radioenzymatic assay, rather than by LC. This is particularly important considering that a patient may receive multiple antibiotics as part of a therapeutic regimen, or their records of treatments may be incomplete. For antimicrobial drugs with relatively low therapeutic indexes, such as aminoglycosides and chloramphenicol, it is very important to monitor their concentrations in blood.
