Potentiometric quantitation of general local anesthetics with a new highly sensitive membrane sensor.

The detection of local anesthetic drugs is of great importance in the analysis of pharmaceutical, clinical and forensic samples. This paper reports a simple and sensitive potentiometric assay suitable for detecting general local anesthetics (LAs) of two types, namely: amino ester-anesthetics (procaine) and amino amide-anesthetics (lidocaine, articaine). As a detector, a new highly sensitive sensor based on a poly(vinyl chloride)-matrix membrane incorporating ion-pair complexes of protonated procaine with 2-[bis-octadecyl-sulfonic)-closo-decaborate is used.