Development and Validation of a High-Performance Liquid Chromatography Method for Quality Assessment of Oriental Medicine, Dokhwalgisaeng-Tang

Dokhwalgisaeng-tang (DHGST) is an herbal medicine formula that is frequently used in the treatment of arthritis in Korea and consists of 16 medicinal herbs. In this study, a simultaneous analysis method for quality assessment of DHGST by universal and widely used high-performance liquid chromatography was developed and validated. Twenty-four marker components were separated on a reverse-phase SunFire C18 column (4.6 x 250 mm, particle size; 5 mu m) maintained at 40 degrees C using a gradient elution of two mobile phase systems (0.1% aqueous formic acid and 0.1% formic acid in acetonitrile). The developed method was validated via linearity, limit of detection, limit of quantification, recovery, and precision. Using the developed method, 24 marker components in DHGST were founded at 0.23-14.68 mg/g, and this method will be used as basic data for the quality assessment of DHGST or other herbal medicine prescriptions.