The use of chromatography hyphenated with mass spectrometry is a well-established approach in clinical and forensic toxicology, particularly for the analysis of the so-called alternative matrices (hair, nails, oral fluid, sweat). This procedure for the quantitative determination of targeted analytes has been reported since the early 1980s and today is the golden standard in analytical toxicology. However this technology has not found wide application the broad spectrum preliminarily screening of samples which is still mostly based on immunoassays.

The aim of the present work was to test a recent instrumental approach based on UHPLC-Ion Trap-MS (Toxtyper®, Bruker Daltonics) intended to be used in routine contexts for the analysis of drug of abuse applied to hair toxicological analysis. The reported analytical method is based on a simple hair pre-treatment consisting of an overnight acid incubation in 0.1 mol/L HCl, followed by direct injection, after neutralization with equimolar amount of NaOH. The separation was then performed using a reverse phase column with a rapid gradient elution of 11 min (from 1% acetonitrile in 0.1% ammonium formate to 95% acetonitrile in 0.1% ammonium formate). Detection was by a fast ion trap analyzer (32,500 m/z sec⁻¹) operating in the mass range 70–800 m/z. The chromatographic retention time and MS2/MS3 data were used for compound identification using a proprietary database which allowed to screen for up to 987 compounds.

The tested analytical method showed limits of detection in the range between 0.01 and 0.09 ng/mg of hair matrix for a panel of 16 drugs of abuse (except for MDA, morphine, 6-MAM and norketamine, which showed limits of detection of 0.25, 0.15, 0.15 and 0.25 ng/mg, respectively). The method was validated according to international guidelines on a selected panel of drugs of abuse. The analytical performance of the instrument was assessed by analyzing 968 hair samples from forensic cases. A good concordance with a reference confirmatory method based on GC–MS was found in terms of classification of both negative and positive samples. Finally, the method was also successfully tested by analyzing 12 proficiency test samples containing not only common drugs of abuse but also new psychoactive substances, including fentanyls and cathinones.

质谱联用色谱法的使用在临床和法医毒理学中是一种公认​​的方法，特别是用于分析所谓的替代基质（头发，指甲，口腔液，汗液）。自1980年代初以来就已经报道了这种用于定量分析目标分析物的方法，如今已成为分析毒理学的黄金标准。然而，该技术尚未在广泛地初步筛选样品的广泛应用中得到广泛应用，该方法仍主要基于免疫测定。

本工作的目的是测试一种基于UHPLC-Ion Trap-MS（Toxtyper®，Bruker Daltonics）的最新仪器方法，旨在在常规情况下用于分析用于头发毒理学分析的滥用药物。报道的分析方法基于简单的头发预处理，包括在0.1 mol / L HCl中过夜酸孵育，然后在等摩尔量的NaOH中和后直接注射。然后使用反相色谱柱进行快速梯度洗脱，分离时间为11分钟（从0.1％甲酸铵中的1％乙腈到0.1％甲酸铵中的95％乙腈）。通过质量范围为70–800 m的快速离子阱分析仪（32,500  m / z sec ^-1）进行检测 / z。色谱保留时间和MS2 / MS3数据使用专有数据库进行化合物鉴定，该数据库最多可筛选987种化合物。

经测试的分析方法显示，对于16种滥用药物（MDA，吗啡，6-MAM和去甲氯胺酮除外，其检出限为0.25，分别为0.15、0.15和0.25 ng / mg）。该方法已根据国际准则在选定的一组滥用药物中进行了验证。该仪器的分析性能通过分析法医案例中的968个头发样品进行评估。在阴性和阳性样品的分类方面，均与基于GC-MS的参考确认方法有很好的一致性。最后，该方法还通过分析12个能力测试样本（包括滥用的常见药物，还包括芬太尼和卡西酮在内的新型精神活性物质）而成功地进行了测试。