Chemometrics in paving the way to analyze levodopa and dopamine in various matrices for monitoring Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders

Abstract Background Levodopa (LD) and dopamine (DA) are essential for managing Parkinson’s disease (PD), a neurological disorder that can cause serious complications. Patients often require multiple medications and ongoing monitoring to effectively manage their symptoms. Developing chemometric-assisted analytical methodologies for determining these therapeutic drugs, along with other co-administered drugs, would certainly be beneficial in clinical practice and therapeutic drug monitoring. Main body The literature has addressed challenges in analyzing LD and DA, as well as concomitant drugs, major metabolites, and impurities of levodopa due to their similar physicochemical properties, which could result in interfering signals. Combining chemometrics with various analytical techniques has offered a fast and highly predictive approach that can simultaneously determine target analytes in complex matrices. Data preprocessing is considered a critical step before applying multivariate data analysis to enhance model prediction. This review mainly focuses on the reported chemometric analytical methods for the qualitative or quantitative determination of levodopa and dopamine in different matrices. The three main perspectives being focused on are implementing chemometric models for quantitative determination, experimental optimization, and discriminant analysis. Spectrophotometry, spectrofluorimetry and voltammetry, coupled with chemometrics, were the primary analytical techniques used for analyzing the studied drugs. Conclusion This review provides a summary of the reported chemometric-assisted analytical techniques and some relevant limitations, aiming to guide researchers in enhancing the robustness and predictive power of analytical methods coupled with chemometrics. A future recommendation is to develop chemometric-assisted methods to simultaneously determine levodopa and dopamine along with other co-administered drugs and related impurities in various biological matrices, such as cerebrospinal fluid and human serum.