| Popis: |
The use of central analgesics in pain management and palliative treatments currently involves empirical adjustments, based on observed clinical outcomes and possible adverse drug reactions. Furthermore, in recent years legislative deregulation regarding these analgesic drugs is giving rise to the problem of misuse, prolonged use and abuse. For these reasons, it is essential to develop analytical tools, allowing therapy customisation and patient compliance improvement and also controlling those cases of Driving Under the Influence (DUI) and workplace injuries. The present research aims to develop an analytical strategy to reliably identify and quantify analgesic drugs such as codeine, morphine and derivatives in haematic samples. The matrices taken into account include plasma, a classical one, and Dried Blood Spot (DBS), which is an innovative and alternative blood sampling technique. DBS guarantees reliable results in perfect agreement with those obtained from plasma samples, with the advantage of requiring a very fast and non-invasive sampling, as well as a simple conservation, without the need for any special precautions, such as freezing or centrifugation. For sample purification, a miniaturised pre-treatment procedure based on Microextraction by Packed Sorbent (MEPS) has been adopted and optimised, while analyte separation was obtained by a chromatographic system consisting of a C8 reverse phase column, as the stationary phase, and a mixture of acetonitrile, methanol and phosphate aqueous buffer, as the mobile phase. Analyte detection has been achieved by coupling the HPLC with a spectrofluorimetric detector (F) that exploits the natural fluorescence of the analytes in order to obtain high sensitivity and selectivity. Tests are currently in progress to fully validate the method, which seems to be very promising for quali-quantitative determination in haematic matrices (plasma and DBS) of analgesic drugs used for pain management. |
