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Tricyclic antidepressants are among the preparations that most frequently cause intoxication in adults and children; moreover, poisoning with these substances not infrequently has a fatal outcome. Medications belonging to this group, such as amitriptyline, are extensively used to manage manifestations of depression, anxiety, migraine, neuropathic pain, and hyperactivity syndrome. Amitriptyline overdosage causes non-specific symptoms of intoxication, and its clinical picture does not allow to identify the nature of a psychotropic xenobiotic. Of primary importance in connection with this is to establish the cause of intoxication or death by the clinical toxicological and forensic medical methods based on the results of the fast identification and quantitation of amitriptyline in biological materials including blood, urine, hepatic tissues, etc. The authors describe the method for the determination of amitriptyline and its principal physiological metabolite nortriptyline in biological objects with the help of high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC).

The present study was designed to estimate the effectiveness of isolation of mirtazapine from the liver, blood, and urine. The conditions were developed for the identification and quantitative measurement of the isolated mirtazapine with the use of high performance liquid chromatography and detection from the UV-spectrum and mass-spectrometry. The retention time of mirtazapine isolated from the liver was 2.88 +/- 0.08 min. The straight-line equation within the range of mirtazapine concentrations from 1 to 20 mc/ml was characterized by the dependence: Y = 3.25 x 10(4)X - 6.27 x 10(3) (r = 0.9997). The study showed that it is possible to isolate 46.44 +/- 1.89% of mirtazapine present in the liver and 50.4 +/- 1.05% from blood using extraction by acetonitrile acidified with an 1 M hydrochloric acid solution. Chloroform extraction from urine at pH 7.0-8.0 releases 90.22 +/- 1.88% of mirtazapine.