SIMULTANEOUS ANALYSIS OF THE BIOACTIVE COMPONENTS OF AN EXTRACT OF YEONGGYECHULGAM-TANG, A TRADITIONAL HERBAL PRESCRIPTION, USING HPLC–DAD

Background: Yeonggyechulgam-tang (YGCGT) is a well-known classic herbal formula and has been used clinically in Korea for the treatment of chest congestion. High-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) analytical method coupled with diode-array detection (DAD) was performed for the simultaneous analysis of eight bioactive components, liquiritin apioside, liquiritin, coumarin, liquiritigenin, cinnamic acid, cinnamaldehyde, glycyrrhizin, and atractylenolide III in a YGCGT decoction.
Materials and Methods: For simultaneous analysis using HPLC, the eight components were separated using a Phenomenex Gemini C₁₈ column (250 mm  4.6 mm; particle size 5 m) eluted with a gradient of 0.1% (v/v) aqueous trifluoroacetic acid and acetonitrile at 1.0 mL/min. The column temperature and injection volume were 40C and 10 L.
Results: Correlation coefficients of the eight compounds ranged between 0.9996 and 1.0000. The lower limits of detection and quantification of the analytes were 0.01–0.09 and 0.02–0.28 g/mL, respectively. Recovery of the eight compounds was 97.63–102.70% and the relative standard deviation (RSD) was less than 3.00%. The RSDs of intra and interday precision were 0.06–2.07% and 0.02–1.95%, respectively. The amounts of the eight compounds in a lyophilized YGCGT were in the range 0.18 to 10.34 mg/g.
Conclusion: The optimized and validated HPLC analytical method used in the present study is expected to be useful for evaluation the quality of YGCGT decoctions or related herbal prescriptions.

Keywords
Simultaneous analysis; Yeonggyechulgam-tang; HPLC–DAD; traditional herbal prescription