Abstract: This paper describes two rapid, sensitive and specific methods for determination of alprazolam with internal standard (tetracosane) in pharmaceutical preparations by gas chromatography (GC) with flame ionization (FID) and mass spectrometric (MS) detection. The calibration curves were linear for alprazolam (r² > 0.99) at the concentration range of 0.25-5 µg mL^-1 and 50-1000 ng mL^-1 with a limit of quantitation of 200 and 40 ng ml^-1 for GC-FID and GC-MS, respectively. The relative standard deviation for intra- and inter-day precision was less than or equal to 2.68 and 5.15%, respectively. The developed GC-FID and GC-MS methods were applied to a pharmaceutical preparation (Xanax) as tablet form which do not require any preliminary separation or treatment of the samples. No interference was found from tablet excipients at the selected assay conditions. Also, the results obtained from two chromatographic methods were statistically compared and no significant difference was found.

 
Key words: Alprazolam, GC-FID, GC-MS, Validation