Determination of icariin content in dietary supplements by high performance liquid chromatography

Abstract

High performance liquid chromatography with PDA detector technique has been applied to analyze the Icariin content in dietary supplements that contains the ingredient of Epimedium. Sample preparation used methanol solvent and ultrasonic technique. Analytical procedure performed on HPLC Alliance-Waters e2695 system with chromatographic column C18 Reliant 2 (250 mm × 4.6 mm, 5 µm) and gradient between acetonitril and phosphoric acid 1% solution in 20 minutes. The validation results showed that the method had good specificity, linear calibration curve in the range of 0.42 - 42 µg/mL, the repeatability and recovery of the method meet the analytical requirements according to AOAC. The method has been deployed to analyze some dietary supplement products on the market and give Icariin content 6.15 - 54.3 mg/g (in dietary supplement) and 6.47 - 24.5 g/100g (in powder extracts).