Comparative Pharmacokinetics of Scoparone and its Metabolite Scopoletin in Normal and ANIT-induced Intrahepatic Cholestatic Rats

Background: Scoparone, the principal natural active ingredient of Artemisia capillaries (Yin Chen), can effectively treat cholestatic diseases, but the pharmacokinetic properties of scoparone are rarely studied in intrahepatic cholestatic rats. Objective: A sensitive and rapid LC-MS/MS method was established to detect scoparone and its metabolite of scopoletin in rat plasma and then compare their plasma pharmacokinetic differences between the normal and ANIT-induced cholestasis rats. Methods: Positive ionization was used to separate scoparone and scopoletin using acetonitrile and 0.1 % formic acid water as the mobile phase on a Hypersil ODS-BP column. Results: The calibration curves presented good linearity (R=0.9983 and 0.9989) in the concentration range of 1010000 ng/mL and 0.5-500 ng/mL for scoparone and scopoletin, respectively. The precision of <= 9.4% and the accuracy ranged from -6.4% to 6.8% were recorded over three validation runs, and the recovery was higher than 83.9%. Under different storage conditions, scoparone and scopoletin were stable. Therefore, we studied the pharmacokinetic properties of scoparone and scopoletin in rats after a single oral administration with the above method. According to the results, the pharmacokinetic parameters of AUC, t(1/2), and C-max values of scoparone in the ANIT group were increased by 106%, 75%, and 44%, respectively, while these values of scopoletin were increased by 142%, 62%, and 65%. Conclusion: The findings indicated that the pharmacokinetic properties of scoparone and scopoletin were significantly different between the normal and ANIT-induced cholestasis rats, which suggested that the clinical application dosage of scoparone should be adjusted according to the liver function of patients.