Full length articleRapid determination of some psychotropic drugs in complex matrices by tandem dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction followed by high performance liquid chromatography

- Tandem dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction (TDLLME), as a novel method with a high sample clean-up, was applied for drug analysis.
- Sample preconcentration and clean-up were easily achieved through a fast and simple process.
- Some psychotropic drugs were successfully determined.

Simple and rapid determinations of some psychotropic drugs in some pharmaceutical wastewater and human plasma samples were successfully accomplished via the tandem dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction combined with high performance liquid chromatography-ultraviolet detection (TDLLME-HPLC-UV). TDLLME of the three psychotropic drugs clozapine, chlorpromazine, and thioridazine was easily performed through two consecutive dispersive liquid-liquid microextractions. By performing this convenient method, proper sample preconcentrations and clean-ups were achieved in just about 7 min. In order to achieve the best extraction efficiency, the effective parameters involved were optimized. The optimal experimental conditions consisted of 100 μL of CCl4 (as the extraction organic solvent), and the pH values of 13 and 2 for the donor and acceptor phases, respectively. Under these optimum experimental conditions, the proposed TDLLME-HPLC-UV technique provided a good linearity in the range of 5-3000 ng mL−1 for the three psychotropic drugs with the correlation of determinations (R2s) higher than 0.996. The limits of quantification (LOQs) and limits of detection (LODs) obtained were 5.0 ng mL−1 and 1.0-1.5 ng mL−1, respectively. Also the proper enrichment factors (EFs) of 96, 99, and 88 for clozapine, chlorpromazine, and thioridazine, respectively, and good extraction repeatabilities (relative standard deviations below 9.3%, n = 5) were obtained.