Coroners often perform postmortem toxicology screenings to measure the amounts of toxins, prescription medications, and drugs of abuse. This involves taking blood, urine, and tissue samples and preparing them for analysis. This project compared three urine sample preparation methods, solid phase extraction (SPE), liquid-liquid extraction (LLE), and un-extracted urine, for a toxicology screen for 58 drugs of abuse. The validation was a qualitative confirmation/ identification plan that measured and analyzed percent recovery, carryover, limit of detection, and case comparison using a gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS). Percent recovery compared SPE, LLE, and un-extracted analytes to see how well the extraction methods recovered the desired analytes. For most of the analytes, the percent recoveries were found to be better using the SPE columns. In the carryover step, SPE columns were used and the negative quality control (QC) was analyzed after the highest calibrator level to makes sure no analyte remained in the GC/MS between samples. The limit of detection was examined to determine the lowest level the analytes can be detected using the SPE columns. The case comparison looked at 10 cases originally tested using the LLE tubes and compared the original results to the results found when the SPE columns were used.

Solid phase extraction (SPE) of urine in postmortem toxicology testing

249th National Meeting (2015)

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