Quantification of 7-aminoflunitrazepam in human urine by polymeric monolith-based capillary liquid chromatography coupled to tandem mass spectrometry

Abstract

Using a simple liquid-liquid extraction (LLE) procedure for sample pretreatment, 7-Aminoflunitrazepam (7-aminoFM2), a major metabolite of flunitrazepam (FM2), was determined in urine samples by polymeric monolith-based capillary liquid chromatography coupled to tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS). The linearity was found in the range of 0.1–50ngmL−1 with a method detection limit (signal-to-noise ratio of 3) estimated at 0.05ngmL−1. Using the proposed method, good precision and recovery were also found in spiked urine samples at the levels of 0.5, 5.0, and 50ngmL−1 (intra-day/inter-day precision: 0.6–1.8% / 0.1–0.8%; post-spiked/pre-spiked recovery: 95.4–102.9% / 96.3–102.5%). In addition, acceptable relative differences (−24.2 – 0.8%) were observed by analyzing clinical urine samples using this monolith-based capillary LC-MS/MS method compared with the results obtained by the routine GC-MC method. Using the monolithic column, no noticeable deterioration of separation efficiency or carry-over was observed for more than 200 injections of urine samples. The applicability of the developed monolith-based capillary LC-MS/MS method was demonstrated by quantifying 7-aminoFM2 in various clinical urine samples. Based on these experimental results, the proposed LLE-monolith-based capillary LC-MS/MS method shows the potential for routine determination of drug metabolites in human urine for clinical and forensic applications.