ETHYL GLUCURONIDE DETERMINATION IN HAIR AS AN INDICATOR OF CHRONIC ALCOHOL ABUSE: A FULLY VALIDATED METHOD BY GC-EI-MS/MS

application note

Hair analysis is a powerful tool for the detection of chronic or past drug ingestion and in recent years it has also been exploited for chronic alcohol abuse. Ethyl glucuronide (EtG) determination in hair has been increasingly employed for diagnosing chronic excessive drinking in both clinical and forensic areas. This work describes a simple fully validated method for the determination of EtG in hair using an Agilent 7890B gas chromatograph coupled to an Agilent 7000C triple quadrupole mass spectrometer detector with an electron impact ion source (GC-EI-MS/MS). N-Methyl-N-(trimethylsilyl) trifluoroacetamide (MSTFA) was used as the derivatizing agent and dimethylformamide (DMF) as the solvent enhancer. Sample decontamination and treatment were performed according to Hastedt et al. (2012). Linearity of the assay was tested between 2.5 – 100 pg/mg. The sensitivity of the method, expressed as limit of quantitation (LOQ), was 2.5 pg/mg. The method has been applied to a number of real samples, with analytical results in the range of < LOQ to 39 pg/mg.