Development of a novel enantioselective high-performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry method for the differentiation of dextro- and levo-methorphan and their O-demethylated metabolites in human blood and its application to post-mortem samples.

Recently we proposed an isocratic enantioselective high-performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) method for the separation and quantitative determination of dextro- (DXM) and levo-methorphan (LVM) and their pharmacologically relevant metabolites, dextrorphan and levorphanol, respectively, in human blood samples. This method was based on the polysaccharide-based chiral column Lux AMP, a specialty column characterized with high stability in mobile phases of pH 11.0 and above. The use of a single-source column is a limitation for any analytical method. Therefore, the major goal of the present study was to develop an enantioselective method for the differentiation of dextro- and levo-methorphan, as well as their metabolites dextrorphan and levorphanol, using Lux Cellulose-3 as alternative chiral column with methanol containing 0.1 % diethylamine mobile phase. A newly developed method uses a chiral selector part of HPLC columns available from multiple manufacturers and a fairly common mobile phase. The method was validated and applied to post-mortem blood samples. Out of 50 analyzed new samples, dextromethorphan (DXM) was detected in 17 samples. Of these 17 cases DXM was accompanied with LVM in 7 samples. The proposed analytical method is relatively simple, accurate and fast and can be adopted for routine use in forensic and clinical toxicology laboratories.

Informations de copyright

Copyright © 2023. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.