A Rapid Screening Procedure for Tricyclic Antidepressant Drugs in Body Fluids by Means of High-Performance Liquid Chromatography

This paper describes relatively simple and rapid procedures for the toxicological analysis of some commonly used tertiary and secondary tricycllc antidepressants. The methodology consists of a single extraction from aqueous media at pH 10 with hexane, followed by high-performanca liquid chroma-tography on silica gel using straight-phase systems. Detec-lion limits are in the order of 100 ng/ml for tertiary trlcyclics and 250 nglml for secondary ones and are sufficiently low to differentiate between normal therapeutic cases and overdose cases. Analysis time, including extraction, is in the order of 30 minutes. Confirmation can be obtained by ion pair adsorp-tion chromatography using the same HPLC column but a different mobile-phase system, or by other chromatographic techniques such as TLC and GLC