UPLC-MS/MS Method for the Simultaneous Quantification of Caffeine and Illicit Psychoactive Drugs in Hair Using a Single-Step High-Speed Grinding Extraction – Insights into a Cut-Off Value for Caffeine Abuse
February 2022
in “
Journal of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis
”
TLDR The conclusion is that a new method can measure caffeine and drugs in hair, finding caffeine abusers have 70 times more caffeine than normal, with a proposed cut-off value for abuse.
The study developed and validated a UPLC-MS/MS method for quantifying caffeine and 13 illicit drugs in hair samples. The method was applied to 479 hair samples, including 52 self-reported caffeine abusers and 24 healthy volunteers. The mean caffeine concentration in hair from caffeine abusers was 70 times higher than that in healthy volunteers. A tentative cut-off value of 5.5 ng/mg was proposed to distinguish caffeine abuse from normal consumption based on the Chinese hair samples. This is the first study to provide an optimized method for combined determination of caffeine and illicit drugs in hair, and to propose a cut-off value for caffeine abuse.
