Citation

Lee HH, Chen SC, Lee JF, Lin HY, Chen BH. Forensic Sci. Int. 2017; 282: 35-40.

Affiliation

Department of Laboratory Medicine, Kaohsiung Medical University Hospital, Kaohsiung, Taiwan; Graduate Institute of Clinical Medicine, College of Medicine, Kaohsiung Medical University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan; Department of Laboratory Medicine, College of Medicine, Kaohsiung Medical University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Electronic address: d670014@kmu.edu.tw.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.forsciint.2017.11.006

PMID

29149685

Abstract

According to domestic and international epidemiological investigation, the proportion of substance involved sexual assault has the trend of ascent. In the past, laboratory methods that investigated urine sample of the sexual assault victims was to screen with enzyme immunoassay and then confirmed with mass spectrometry. The objective of the study is to simultaneously identify abused drugs in 126 decoded urine samples of sexual assault victims by liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry. The instrument was operated in multiple-reaction monitoring with an electro-spray positive ionization mode. Chromatograms were separated with ACE5 C18 column on a gradient of acetonitrile. After liquid-liquid extraction, samples were passed through a 0.22μm PVDF filter before injection into the system. The limits of quantitation ranged from 0.2 to 10ng/mL. The precision (CV) results were below 12.9% (intraday) and 15.0% (interday). The intraday accuracy ranged from 84.8 to 121.0%, interday accuracy ranged from 72.0 to 117.3%. We found that 29 (23.0%) were positive for drugs. The most common drug identified is flunitrazepam (11.1%), followed by nimetazepam and ketamine (7.9%), some new psychoactive substances, such as 2C-B, mephedrone, methylone, PMA and PMMA were also identified. We identified abused drugs, benzodiazepines, and new psychoactive substances in urine of sexual assault victims by using liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry.

Copyright © 2017. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Language: en

Keywords

Drug abuse; Liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry; New psychoactive substances; Sexual assault; Urine