Magnetic nano graphene oxide as solid phase extraction adsorbent coupled with liquid chromatography to determine pseudoephedrine in urine samples

• Magnetic solid phase extraction is a novel drug pretreatment method.
• Magnetic nanographene oxide (MNGO) was used as a new drug adsorbent.
• Pseudoephedrine was efficiently extracted from urine samples by applying MNGO.

This paper reports on a method based on magnetic solid phase extraction (MSPE) for the determination of pseudoephedrine. Magnetic nanographene oxide (MNGO) was applied as a new adsorbent for the extraction of pseudoephedrine from urine samples. Synthesis of MNGO was characterized by Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), powder X-ray diffraction (XRD), and vibrating sample magnetometer (VSM). The main factors influencing extraction efficiency, including the amounts of sample volume, amount of adsorbent, type and amount of extraction organic solvent, time of extraction and desorption, pH, ionic strength of extraction medium, and agitation rate, were investigated and optimized. Under optimized extraction conditions, a good linearity was observed in the range of 100–2000 ng/mL with a correlation coefficient of 0.9908 (r2). Limit of detection (LOD) and limit of quantification (LOQ) were 25 and 82.7 ng/mL, respectively. Inter-day and intra-day precision and accuracy were 6.01 and 0.34 (%), and 8.70 and 0.29 (%), respectively. The method was applied for the determination of pseudoephedrine in urine samples of volunteers receiving pseudoephedrine with the recovery of 96.42. It was concluded that the proposed method can be applied in diagnostic clinics.