Comparison of Pharmacokinetic Profiles of Moxifloxacin in Caesarean versus Non-Pregnant Sectioned Women by Fully Validated HPLC with Fluorescence Detection

In this study, a simple, rapid, cost-effective, and sensitive reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatographic method has been developed and validated for the analysis of moxifloxacin in plasma. The chromatographic separation was achieved on a Zorbax Eclipse XDB-C18 column (150 mm x 4.6 mm i.d.) connected to a Phenomenex C-18 column (4 mm x 3.0 mm i.d.) using a mixture of acetonitrile: 15 mM citrate buffer (pH 3) (23:77, v/v) as the mobile phase with isocratic system at a flow rate of 1 mL/min. Fluorescence detection was employed with excitation at 290 nm and emission at 500 nm. Lomefloxacin was used as internal standard. Plasma samples were prepared with addition of acetonitrile only. The method was fully validated according to the International Conference on Harmonization (ICH) guidelines. The results of the validation parameters were: linearity range, 3-6000 ng/mL (R-2 = 0.9994); mean recovery, 100.48 %; limit of quantification, 5 ng/mL; limit of detection, 1 ng/mL; and intra- and inter-day precision less than 3.2% and 5.1%, respectively. The robustness of the method was evaluated and confirmed with fractional factorial design. After validation studies, the method was applied in order to conclude the effects of pregnancy on postoperative pharmacokinetic profiles of moxifloxacin. For this aim, moxifloxacin was given to non-pregnant women (n=9) and caesarean-sectioned women (n=6) as a single intravenous dose (400 mg Avelox (R) infusion). Plasma samples were analyzed in order to compare pharmacokinetic profiles of pregnants and non-pregnants. Peak serum concentrations of non-pregnant and caesarean-sectioned women at the arterial port after the infusion were 4.95 +/- 1.50 and 1.56 +/- 0.16 mu g/mL, respectively. The mean elimination half-life, volume of distribution and calculated area under the concentration-time curve (AUC)(0-infinity) were 5.54 +/- 0.73 h, 65.58 +/- 6.30 L and 49.95 +/- 6.30 mu g.h/mL for non-pregnant women and 3.50 +/- 0.37 h, 215.85 +/- 24.87 L and 10.53 +/- 0.66 mu g.h/mL for caesarean-sectioned women, respectively. These results indicated that pregnancy has a significant effect on the pharmacokinetic profiles of moxifloxacin.