SOFT 2004 Meeting Abstracts - Society of Forensic Toxicologists

M39
QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OF DEXTROMETHORPHAN, CARISOPRODOL AND THEIR
METABOLITES IN HAIR BY GC-MS
Wonkyung Yang l *, Eunyoung Han l , Yonghoon Park l ,Miae Lim', Myungyun Py02 and Heesun Chung I :
INational Institute of Scientific Investigation, Seoul; 2Korea, School of Pharmacy, Sookmyung Women's
University, Seoul, Korea
Dextromethorphan, which is used as an antitussive agent, and carisoprodol, which is used as a muscle
relaxant, have been widely abused among young people in Korea. Even though these are known to be very
safe drugs for therapeutic use, people abused them for their hallucinogenic properties. Due to the serious
abuse liability potential of these drugs, our government recently decided to control them as psychotropic
agents. It was necessary for us to establish a detection method for dextromethorphan and carisoprodol and
their metabolites in hair to demonstrate the abuse of these drugs. A method was established to
simultaneous quantify dextromethorphan, dextrorphan, 3-methoxymorphinan, carisoprodol and
meprobamate in hair samples. Analytes were extracted from fine cuttings of hair in 1 % HCI in methanol for
16 hours. After evaporation under N2, residues were separated on a HP - 5MS column using a 16 min
program and identified by mass spectrometry in the SIM mode (EI-GC-MS).This method was validated for
the recovery, linearity of calibration, within-and between-day precision, accuracy, limit of detection and
quantification. Calibration curves exhibited correlation coefficients > 0.99. Within and between-run
precision was calculated at 8, 80 and 400 nglmg of drug or metabolite in hair with coefficients of variation
less than 14 %, except for meprobamate (17%). Accuracy at the same concentrations was 14% oftarget for
all analytes except meprobamate (18%). Recoveries at 10 and 100 ng of drug or metabolite in hair were 88
to 117 %. With this method, we performed quantitative analysis of dextromethorphan and carisoprodol in
abuser's hair. The concentrations of dextromethorphan, dextrorphan and 3-methoxymorphinan ranged from
1.4 - 225.0, 1.3 - 44.7, and 0 - 42.7 nglmg in hair from 31 donors studied, respectively. The level of
carisoprodol and meprobamate were 2.3 - 52.9 and 11.3 - 365.1 ng/mg respectively in 11 hair samples. We
present a validated, sensitive and specific GC-MS method to simultaneously quantify dextromethorphan,
carisoprodol and metabolites in hair.
Keywords: Dextromethorphan, Carisoprodol, Hair Analysis
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