Determination of atorvastatin in human serum by salting out assisted solvent extraction and reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography–UV detection

A simple and rapid technique based on salting out assisted solvent extraction was developed for extraction of atorvastatin from serum sample and high performance liquid chromatography–UV was used for its detection. In the present study, 1.0 mL serum was extracted by 0.5 mL of acetonitrile and some parameters that can affect extraction such as type and volume of extraction solvent, type of salt, and pH were optimized. Under optimized experimental conditions, the calibration curve was found to be linear in the range of 0.001–10 ng mL−1 in human serum and the correlation coefficient (R2) and the limits of detection were >0.99 and 0.0005 ng mL−1, respectively. The accuracy of the method in terms of average recovery of the compound in spiked serum and water samples was better than 90%.