Determination of drugs of abuse in urine and oral fluid samples

Identifier:  TDX:3910

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/TDX3910

Authors:  Pascual Caro, Sergi

Abstract:
Drugs of abuse have been present in our lives for years, being amphetamines, cocaine, opioids and cannabis some of the most widely used by the population. In recent times, new psychoactive substances have emerged as an alternative to conventional drugs, and the determination of all these substances is necessary in various biological samples such as urine, saliva, blood or hair. However, as they are complex matrices, once collected, it is very common to use different pre-treatment techniques before analysis. Trends in toxicological and forensic analysis are based on the acquisition of fast methods, which reach low levels of concentration and include the analysis of different types of substances as well as their metabolites. It is for this reason that this Doctoral Thesis focuses on the development and application of new methodologies for determining different families of drugs, as well as some of their metabolites in urine and saliva samples by liquid chromatography and capillary electrophoresis. The use of the latter technique has been used to determine the enantiomers of some drugs. This fact is important because many drugs are chiral and can have two enantiomeric forms with different pharmacokinetic and pharmacological properties. The coupling of liquid chromatography and capillary electrophoresis with mass spectrometry achieves high sensitivity. However, due to the low concentrations at which these compounds can be found in biological samples, and that there are often some compounds that can interfere with the analytes of interest, the use of various pre-treatment techniques such as SPE has been a common practice. The applicability of the developed methodologies has been realized by determining drugs of abuse in patients starting a detoxification program.