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Rapid analysis of drugs of abuse and their metabolites in human urine using dilute and shoot liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry

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Abstract

Liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometric method for analysis of 113 abuse drugs and their metabolites in human urine was developed and validated. A simple sample clean-up procedure using the “dilute and shoot” approach, followed by reversed phase separation, provided a fast and reliable method for routine analysis. Drugs were separated in a Capcell Pak MG-III C18 column using a gradient elution of 1 mM ammonium formate with 0.1% formic acid in water and acetonitrile. The total time for analysis was 32 min. The multiple reaction monitoring mode using two transitions (e.g., quantifier and qualifier) was optimized for both identification and determination. The calibration curves for each analyte were linear over the concentration ranges of 1–100, 5–100, or 10–100 ng/mL using 400 μL of human urine sample with the coefficient of determination above 0.9921. The coefficient of variation and accuracy for the intra- and inter-assays of the tested drugs at three QC levels were 1.1–14.6 and 86.7–106.8%, respectively. The present method was successfully applied to the analysis of forensic urine samples obtained from 17 drug abusers. This method is useful for the rapid and accurate determination of multiple drug abuse with a small amount of urine in forensic and clinical toxicology.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) Grant funded by the Korea government (MSIP) (NRF-2015M3A9E1028325) and Supreme Prosecutors’ Office of Korea.

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Correspondence to Hee Seung Kim or Hye Suk Lee.

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Kong, T.Y., Kim, J.H., Kim, J.Y. et al. Rapid analysis of drugs of abuse and their metabolites in human urine using dilute and shoot liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry. Arch. Pharm. Res. 40, 180–196 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12272-016-0862-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12272-016-0862-1

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