Abstract
Synthetic cathinones have become very popular recreational drugs. Therefore, determining them in biological samples is now a matter of concern. In recent years, different methods that have been developed can determine these drugs at low-concentration levels. In general, liquid chromatography mass spectrometry detection plays an important role in these methods and the trend is to use low-resolution and high-resolution mass spectrometry. In this article, for the first time, we compare these two analyzers using an Orbitrap and a triple quadrupole mass spectrometer in order to determine a group of synthetic cathinones in urine and oral fluid samples. For this comparison, we evaluated and compared different parameters: Method detection and quantification limits, linearity, apparent recoveries, matrix effect, repeatability (intra-day), reproducibility (inter-day), and accuracy. Similar results were obtained for the two analyzers for the apparent recoveries and matrix effect. However, triple quadrupole showed higher sensitivity compared to Orbitrap for both urine and oral fluid samples. The quantification limits in urine and the detection limits in saliva were two times lower for triple quadrupole. Finally, when blind samples were analyzed to study the accuracy, similar results were obtained for both analyzers.
Highlights
Synthetic cathinones are an important group among the new psychoactive substances (NPS)that have emerged in recent years as some of the most common drugs around the world [1,2].These compounds are synthetized from the molecule cathinone, a natural alkaloid that can be found in the Catha edulis plant [3]
This is because they have similar effects to some of these drugs, such as paranoia and euphoria, which can be partly attributed to their similarity to amphetamine compounds [2,4]; cathinones have an additional ketone group at the β position of the amino chain
In order to evaluate both liquid chromatography (LC)-Mass spectrometry (MS)/MS and LC-high-resolution MS (HRMS) methodologies, the methods for urine and oral fluid (OF) samples for the two detectors were validated to compare their performance in terms of linearity, method detection limits (MDL), method quantification limits (MQLs), Rapp, matrix effects (ME), and accuracy of the methods
Summary
That have emerged in recent years as some of the most common drugs around the world [1,2] These compounds are synthetized from the molecule cathinone, a natural alkaloid that can be found in the Catha edulis plant [3]. They were first synthetized for medical purposes, they began being used as recreational drugs and have emerged as an important alternative to other worldwide popular drugs such as cocaine, amphetamine, or ecstasy [3]. Synthetic cathinones are sold as “bath salts” and can be found
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