Detection and Analysis of Blood Dexmedetomidine in Drug-Facilitated Cases

Abstract

Objective To establish a simple and rapid qualitative and quantitative detection method of dexmedetomidine in blood. Methods Blood was separated on the Allure PFP Propyl liquid chromatography column with isocratic elution after it was precipitated by acetonitrile and filtered. Qualitative and quantitative analysis of dexmedetomidine was performed using positive ion scan mode and multi-reaction monitoring mode. Results The limit of detection of dexmedetomidine in blood was 0.2 ng/mL and the limit of quantification was 0.5 ng/mL. The linearity of the method was good in the range of 0.5-1 000 ng/mL, and the correlation coefficient was greater than 0.99. The accuracy of the method was 90.34%-112.67% and the extraction recovery was 50.05%-91.08%, with no significant matrix effect. Conclusion This method is simple, selective and suitable for the qualitative and quantitative analysis of dexmedetomidine in blood, which can provide a reference for drug-facilitated cases involving dexmedetomidine.

Keywords

• |forensic toxicology|drug facilitated crimes|dexmedetomidine|liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry|blood