High-performance liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry for the analysis of bile acid profiles in serum of women with intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy

Quantification of the 15 major human bile acids and their precursor 7α-hydroxy-4-cholesten-3-one in serum by liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry

“…For bile acids, LOQ ranged from 2nmol/l to 50nmol/l. After correction for sample volume, this was comparable or slightly better than what has been reported in recent publications providing LOQ values [16,[18][19][20][23][24] (Table 4). For C4, LOQ was 5nmol/l, which is similar to what was reported by DeBarber et al [25].…”

“…Table 4 summarizes and compares extraction recoveries of the here and previously reported methods for the measurement of bile acids and C4. Extraction recoveries for bile acids were quite similar to those reported for other existing methods [16][17][18]20,[22][23][24]. The extraction recovery for C4 was found to be approximately 62%, which was markedly lower than for bile acids and for other C4 methods [12,14,[25][26].…”

“…In contrast to gas chromatography, which requires laborious sample preparation including hydrolysis and derivatisation, liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (LC-MS(/MS)) nowadays represents the most convenient alternative for this type of analysis, as demonstrated by the number of new quantification methods developed in the past years for bile acids [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] and C4 [12,14,[25][26].…”

“…Our new methods each required only 100μl of serum sample, which was less than for many of the existing methods [12,14,16,20,[22][23][24] although methods for quantification of C4 in even smaller sample volumes exist [25][26]. A low sample volume represents an important advantage if the method is to be adapted for analysis of mouse samples (muricholic acids), since mice have a very small blood volume.…”

Bile Acid Profiling and Quantification in Biofluids Using Ultra-Performance Liquid Chromatography Tandem Mass Spectrometry

“…[15][16][17] Within the past decade, LC-MS has been heavily utilized for the separation and detection of BAs in human and animal model biofluid samples. 9,[18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34] The most comprehensive of these methods have a relatively long analytical cycle (> 30 minutes), precluding rapid sample analysis. 21,25,28,30,34 On the other hand, the most rapid methods (< 10 minutes) have limited BA coverage.…”