Emergency Toxicology Testing (Detection, Confirmation, and Quantification) of Basic Drugs in Serum by Liquid Chromatography with Photodiode Array Detection

We investigated the applicability of liquidchromatography with photodiode array detection as a serum drug screen-ing technique in an emergency toxicology setting. Basic compounds are extracted from alkalinized serum with hexane and chromatographed on a cyanopropyl re-versed-phase column. The photodiode array detector records the ultraviolet spectrum of each eluting peak for identification and quantification. More than 30 drugs! metabolites including antidepressants, antihistamines, phenothiazines, and analgesics are detected at their therapeutic concentrations or less. Quantitative run-to-run precision (CV) for antidepressant drugs at lowtherapeutic concentrations is <6%. We evaluated the potential for interference of>140 compounds of clinical interest. In a split-sample study, 151 of 154 positive drug findings b