Rapid Determination of the Blood Level of Psycotic Drugs

Simultaneous determination of several psycotic drugs in blood in a short time The treatment of patients suffering from different types of psychiatric problems is often carried out administrating them with mixtures of more psycotic drugs. This procedure arises from several considerations. First, usually this kind of drugs suffers from different grades of side effects, so that it is a common procedure to face them by administrating complementary drugs. Moreover the psychiatric disorders themselves are often a mixture of different states, depressive, obsessive, convulsive, anxious, etc., and specific action drugs are used to fight any of these states. Unfortunately the mixtures are normally used as a sum without taking into account possible interactions inside the organism. On top of that, sometimes it is important to check the effective assumption of the drugs. Most of the drugs taken into account in the present investigation are basic, so that positive electrospray has been chosen as ionization technique. The different compounds have been separately optimized and the best transition and source parameters have been found for each of them: nicotine (163-132), caffeine (195-138), carbamazepine (237-194), amitriptyline (278-233), imipramine (281-86), sertraline (306-275), alprazolam (309-281), fluoxetine (310-44), clomipramine (315-86), fluvoxamine (319-71), clozapine (327-270), and paroxetine (330-192). The HPLC separation have been carried out by a Phenomenex Synergi POLAR 2x50 mm, 4 &mum particle size, using a gradient water/acetonitrile/ammonium acetate/formic acid in 4 min. The separation of the 12 drugs reavealed quite challenging. Several HPLC columns and mobile phase conditions were tested. Finally the use of a phenyl ether with polar endcapping stationary phase allowed a reasonsable separation in a short time. The use of a partially buffered mobile phase (ammonium acetate is present only in the water component) allowed to retain nicotine and caffeine for about 2 minutes inside the HPLC column. The use of the only formic acid as a modifier causes the elution of the nicotine with the solvent front and the caffeine shortly after, in a region suffering fron high suppression effects. The use of the only ammonium acetate as a modifier causes much longer analysis times. The study of matrix effects has been performed on serum and plasmas containing different anticoagulant agents. The results obtained have been compared and evalued and experiments on spiked real samples are currently in progress