Identification and determination of corticosteroids in adrenal gland extracts for pharmaceutical use by HPLC

Summary

Some HPLC procedures with isocratic or gradient elution are reported for the identification and determination of most of the characteristic components of cortical extracts.

The proposed solvent systems were: A) for normal phase chromatography, mixtures of chloroform-methanol-water on silica columns. B) For reversed phase chromatography, mixtures of methanol-water or acetonitrile-water or tetrahydrofuran-water on octadecyl silica columns of different brands. With these systems it was possible to identify and determine, in addition to the principal corticosteroids, some minor components of the cortical extracts as the 20β-dihydroderivatives of compounds F, E, A, B, the 17-ketosteroids adrenosterone, 11β-hydroxyandrostendione and androstendione and finally, progesterone and 17-OH progesterone. In reversed phase chromatography it was also possible, by monitoring the effluent at 205 nm, to reveal the 5α- and 5β-tetrahydroderivatives of the main corticosteroids and to separate them from most of the steroidal components of the adrenal extracts; in these conditions it was also possible to reveal some characteristic, unknown components of the cortical extracts. Some results of quantitative analysis of cortical extracts are also reported, comparing different analytical procedures.