Abstract
New psychoactive substances (NPS) have been introduced into the market in recent years, with new analytes reported every year. The use of these substances in women can occur at any stage of life, even in the childbearing age. Drug use during pregnancy presents significant risks for the mother and the fetus, so it is important to have tools that allow to detect prenatal exposure to these substances of abuse. Therefore, an analytical method for the determination of 137 NPS and other drugs of abuse in meconium by UHPLC-QTOF was developed and validated for semi-quantitative purpose. Linearity range, limit of detection (LOD), precision, matrix effect, selectivity, and specificity were evaluated. For all analytes, the calibration curves were studied in the ranges between 2, 10, or 50 ng/g and 750 or 1000 ng/g, (depending on the analyte) and the LOD ranged between 0.04 and 2.4 ng/g. The method was applied to 30 meconium specimens from cases in which fentanyl had been administered as epidural anesthesia at the time of delivery or cases in which the maternal hair was positive to other drug of abuse. Four meconium samples tested positive for fentanyl (range concentration = 440–750 ng/g) and two samples tested positive to acetylfentanyl (range concentration = 190–1400 ng/g).
Highlights
New psychoactive substances (NPS) are new chemicals designed to mimic the effects of classic drugs
Other procedures for the detection of NPS in meconium have been published [13,14,15], but the number of target analytes was limited. All these methods were developed in targeted LC-MS/MS, a valid analysis technique in most cases but with a limited capacity of detecting multianalyte when new compounds are constantly introduced into the market
As in the present method, all the mentioned analytical methods carried out an extraction procedure [23,24,25,26] or even two separate extractions [22], paying special attention to the choice of the extraction solvent in order to achieve good recovery for all the compounds, which have varying chemical structures
Summary
New psychoactive substances (NPS) are new chemicals designed to mimic the effects of classic drugs (cocaine, cannabis, heroine, etc.). Different NPS are reported every year and their presence has already been detected in more than 100 countries. Due to their unregulated status, these drugs were initially sold on the Internet as “legal highs” or “bath salts,” so efforts have been made to speed up the legislation on their production and distribution [2]. The main substance groups of NPS present in the market in 2019 were stimulants (36%), synthetic cannabinoids (31%), classic hallucinogens (15%), and opioids (8%) [1]
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