Xylazine as veterinary medicine for sedation, but intoxication cases in humans were identified in the last few years. A highly sensitive method is required for analyzing xylazine and its metabolites in human blood and urine. This article presents an ultra high performance liquid chromatography coupled with quadrupole-time of flight mass spectrometry (UHPLC-QTOF) study for simultaneous determination of xylazine and 2,6-dimethylaniline (DMA) in human blood and urine. The samples were extracted and cleaned up by Oasis MCX solid-phase extraction. The analysis is performed using an UHPLC-QTOF. Analysis precision, accuracy, sensitivity, linear range, limit of detection (LOD) and limit of quantification (LOQ) were validated for the proposed method. In the blood and urine samples, the linear calibration curves with high linearity are obtained over the range of 2.0-1,000.0 ng/mL. The LOD for xylazine and DMA in blood are 0.2 and 0.1 ng/mL, in urine are 0.4 and 0.2 ng/mL; the LOQ for xylazine and DMA in blood are 0.6 and 0.3 ng/mL, in urine are 1.0 and 0.6 ng/mL, respectively. The intra- and interday precision is better than 8.6 and 11.9%. In conclusion, the proposed method is highly sensitive and reproducible, thus suitable for accurate quantification of xylazine and its metabolites in blood and urine.

This paper describes the use of UPHLC-QTOF for the analysis of pesticide amitraz and its metabolites in human blood. UPHLC-QTOF working in full scan mode simultaneously with a single MS/MS scan at 10 eV was employed to analyze in solid-support liquid-liquid extracts (SLE) of the human blood. Detection and quantification were carried out using full scan data (protonated molecules [M+H]+) while MS/MS data were used for fragment identification only. MS/MS scans were not found to have any negative influence on quantitation under the applied conditions. Verification studies were accomplished at low concentrations (1 ng/mL), and accuracy errors lower than 5 ppm were achieved. The human blood extracts spiked at LOQ and three QC fortification levels produced average recoveries in the range of 79.3-92.5% with relative standard deviations smaller than 10% for all analytes. Limits of detection (LODs) were between 0.1 and 0.5 ng/mL. Finally, the proposed method was successfully applied to a case of human poisoning.

Polymers have been used in different areas. Recently, polymeric material is favored in analytical area due to its high performance and high consistency, which was used in sample pretreatment in this study. Xylazine poisoning is often seen in body fluid samples obtained from various accidents or suicides. However, the content of xylazine is difficult to detect precisely due to matrix effect in testing practices. In this paper, a method application for phospholipid adsorption polymeric materials to determine xylazine in blood and urine samples was proposed, developed, and validated. Compared with existing method, this method using polymeric pretreatment has a wider linear range of 2.0–2000.0 ng/mL for xylazine and its metabolite 2,6-dimethylaniline in both blood and urine and lower detection limits of 0.3 ng/mL for 2,6-dimethylaniline and xylazine in blood and 0.2 ng/mL for 2,6-dimethylaniline and xylazine in urine. Therefore, this method is suggested to be applied in testing practices by academic groups and commercial organizations.