ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the possibilities of spectrophotometry in the stability studies of pharmaceutical preparations. It also reviews the special problems connected with the determination of pharmaceuticals in various matrices. Due to the large number of parallel measurements required here, spectrophotometric methods, which are simple, sufficiently sensitive and easy to automate, are particularly suitable for checking the variation of declared, nominal active principle content of drug preparations. Even by selective extraction, the possibility of direct spectrophotometric determination is an exception. Naturally, for ointments and creams there is also a wide choice of spectrophotometric methods based on chemical reactions. The column chromatographic purification of the extract is more important in the case of ointments and creams than in other pharmaceutical preparations. Serious efforts have been made in the field of the automation of pharmaceutical analysis; the basic measurement techniques had been developed already in the 1960s and have become widespread in subsequent years.
