High-performance liquid chromatographic determination of diacetylmorphine metabolites in urine and postmortem plasma

Abstract

Determination of drugs of abuse in blood is of great importance in clinical and forensic toxicology. This paper represents a simple and rapid method for the determination of diacetyl morphine metabolites in urine and postmortem plasma specimens using reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography with ultraviolet spectrophotometric detection. The proposed method was based on using C18 column with mobile phase consisting of a mixture of acetonitrile-20 mM KH2PO4-diethylamine (10: 90: 0.1, v/v, pH 3.0 adjusted with phosphoric acid). Quantitation was achieved with UV detection at 280 nm using phenylephrine as internal standard. The metabolites were successfully extracted from addict urine and postmortem plasma with good recoveries and reproducibility.