Liquid Chromatographic Determination of Scopolamine in Hair with Suspended Drop Liquid Phase Microextraction Technique

Hair analysis is used in some branches of alternative medicine as a method of investigation to assist diagnosis. It is very useful when a history of drug use is difficult or impossible to obtain. In this research suspended droplet liquid phase microextraction (SDLME) coupled with high-performance liquid chromatography and photodiode array detection (HPLC-DAD) was used for preconcentration and analysis of scopolamine in hair samples. Therefore scopolamine was extracted from 2.0 g hair sample incubated in methanol (5 h, 50 ̊C) and adjusted to pH 7.4 with, Na2HPO4–H3PO4 buffer solution (donor phase, P1) into an organic phase (P2) 350 μl n-octanol and then back extracted into a micro drop of aqueous acceptor phase (P3), adjusted at pH 3, with HCL. The extraction time, T1 (from P1 to P2) was 2 min and T2 (from P2 to P3) was 30 min. Optimum instrumental conditions were included; A C18 reverse phase column with water-acetonitrilemethanol (80:10:10) as the mobile phase was used and wavelength for UV detection was 205 nm. The linear range was 10 to 10000 ng·mL, enrichment factor, detection limit and relative standard deviation were 77, 0.1 ng·mL and 5.4 respectively.