Abstract
•Traditionally abused drugs remains stable and represent major causes of death.•In toxicology investigations, the most important goal is the correct identification of drugs or poisons.•In Saudi Arabia, amphetamine (captagon™) is the most commonly encountered drug in cases of drug abuse
The aim of this work was to develop and validate a liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry method for detecting sixty drugs and metabolites that are most commonly encountered in postmortem whole blood analysis. Although a large number of drugs were included in the panel, acceptance criteria for method validation were achieved. All calibration curves were found to be linear with coefficients of determination greater than 0.99. The limits of detection ranged from 0.2ng/mL to 1.0ng/mL and the limits of quantification range from 1.0ng/mL to 5.0ng/mL. Using three controls, within-run precision was 0.7%–10.3% and between-run precision was 0.6%–9.0%. Accuracy was ranged from 95.0%–104.1%. Matrix effects ranged from −15% to +22%. After excluding matrix effects, analytical recoveries ranged from 76% to 100%. Coefficients of variation for matrix effects ranged from 0.5%–13% and coefficients of variation for recovery ranged from 0.9%–13.0%. Over 1000 postmortem blood samples were analyzed. Among them, 435 cases (45%) tested positive for at least one analyte of interest. In conclusion, this study presents a technique for multianalyte screening of sixty drugs and metabolites that are commonly encountered in postmortem toxicology. This technique was then applied in routine analysis of autopsy blood samples in order to assess the applicability of this method. Data from postmortem cases is rarely reported from Saudi Arabia, and one of the current study goals is to present new information from postmortem cases to help prevent wide-spread drug use.