Simultaneous quantitative measurement of fourteen adrenal steroids by capillary column gas chromatographymass spectrometry, and its clinical application

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Until now, there has been little work covering all of the main native adrenal-cortical steroids in blood. We therefore established a method for the simultaneous quantitative measurement of 14 native adrenal-cortical steroids, which involves capillary column gas chromatographymass spectrometry (GCMS). Serum steroids were purified from serum with the Extrelut® mini-column and then converted into stable derivatives for GCMS by a combination of boronic cyclization and trimethylsilyl and methyloxime derivatization. The sensitivities (with a signal-to-noise ratio ⩾ 7) of our GCMS method ranged from 0.1 to 1.0 ng/ml of serum, and the coefficients of variation of intra- and inter-assays were 19% for each steroid. Our newly devised method involving a capillary column GCMS system has been proven to be a simple and suitable method for a diagnosis requiring simultaneous detection of many native adrenal steroids in clinical practice. the analysis time is only 4 h.