Abstract

In the last few decades a new generation of designer drugs, the beta-ketoamphetamines, of which methcathinone and mephedrone (4-methylmethcathinone) are the best known members of this family, have rapidly appeared on the drug market. In the present study, a rapid HPLC-DAD method for the simultaneous analysis of mephedrone and methcathinone after liquid-liquid extraction (LLE) from blood and serum matrices was developed and validated. Chromatographic separation was achieved in less than 10 minutes under isocratic conditions. The LLE method used dichloromethane and butanol as the organic phase followed by re-extraction into an acidic aqueous phase, which was directly injected onto the HPLC instrument. The LLE recovery values ranged between 83-109%. Good linearity was obtained for both drugs for the specified range (0.1-10 μg/mL). The developed method was found to be specific, accurate, repeatable and precise with RSD values ≤ 5.59% and to have acceptable sensitivity, where limits of detection (LOD) were 0.011 and 0.013 μg/mL, and limits of quantitation (LOQ) were 0.036 and 0.043 μg/mL for mephedrone and quantitation (LOQ) were 0.036 and 0.043 μg/mL for mephedrone and methcathinone, respectively.