Ascorbic acid (AA) and Dehydroascorbic acid (DHA) belong to the group of small polar molecules, which are difficult to retain in conventional reversed phase (RP) chromatographic systems. A development of simple and fast analytical method for the simultaneous determination of both acids is a real analytical challenge.
So far, most of the published methods include an oxidation/reduction pretreatment step (in order to obtain only one of redox forms) and subsequent two step analysis followed by subtraction. Such approach is however time-consuming and might also bring sever inaccuracies.