TOXICOLOGICAL DRUG SCREENING BY GC-MS VERSUS HPLC-DAD USING A COMMON EFFICIENT EXTRACTION PROCEDURE SCREENING TOXICOLOGIQUE DES MEDICAMENTS PAR HPLC-DAD ET GC-MS: PROTOCOLE D’EXTRACTION UNIQUE

Abstract

This paper presents a common extraction method for toxicological drug screening by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) and high-performance liquid chromatography with diode-array detection (HPLC-DAD). Liquid-liquid extraction was performed using plasma of 104 samples at the Laboratory of Moroccan Poison Control and Pharmacovigilance Center during a period of 12 months. The results obtained by HPLC-DAD are compared with those determined with GC-MS. 76 cases (73.08 %) were found positive for at least by one of these two techniques. HPLC-DAD identified 59.87 % of all positive results, and 10 molecules were identified only by HPLC-DAD. GC/MS identified 40.13 % of all positives, and 4 molecules were identified only by GC/MS. In order to evaluate the performance of this extraction method, an extraction yield was calculated for three classes of drugs. All the analyzed molecules were obtained in satisfactory yields (higher than 50 %) except for carbamazepine, amitriptyline and nortriptyline. Overall, the results indicate that the extraction method is well adapted for toxicological drug screening. The use of common extraction simultaneously for the two techniques can reduce workload and costs of screening, while increasing the validity and reliability of the results.

Keywords

• drug
• gas chromatography-mass spectrometry
• high performance liquid chromatography with diode-array detection
• liquid-liquid extraction
• screening