Search

In case of an adverse analytical finding, a low (estimate) urine concentration can be the consequence of 2 very different situations: it can be the tail end of a drug voluntarily consumed to enhance athletic performance, even by microdosing (which is not effective for all drugs), or it can be the result of a contamination, irrespective of its source. For numerous doping agents, a hair test can allow discriminating doping from contamination based on the measured concentration or even the absence of the target drug. Given hair produces incremental concentrations, its analysis offers the possibility of establishing a pattern of drug use and thus, verifying self-reported histories of exposure. In order to provide a retrospective calendar of drug use, segmental analysis of the hair strand can be performed. In doping, the usual practice is to test the substance in short segments, such as 1 cm to avoid drug dilution when using larger segments. During the last months, seven athletes have returned an adverse analytical finding for the diuretic chlortalidone, with reported urine concentrations in the range 20 to 50 ng/mL. All these athletes submitted, via their legal team, their hair for establishing a pattern of exposure. Results were always consistent with incidental contamination (hair concentration lower than 5 pg/mg), although the source of contamination was never identified. The interpretation of the findings was established in the light of the limited literature, including hair tests after microdosing and therapeutic use., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Three methods are presented for the simultaneous determination of atenolol (AT), amiloride hydrochloride (AM) and chlorthalidone (CD). The high performance liquid chromatographic (HPLC) method depends on the separation of each drug on a reversed phase, RP (18) column. Elution was carried out with a mobile phase consisting of acetonitrile -5mM heptansulphonic acid sodium salt (20:80, v/v, pH 4.4). Quantitation was achieved with UV detection at 274 nm based on peak area. The other two-chemometric-assisted spectrophotometric methods applied were principal component regression (PCR) and partial least squares (PLS-1). These approaches were successfully applied to quantify each drug in the mixture using the information included in the absorption spectra of appropriate solutions in the range 240-290 nm with the intervals Deltalambda=0.2 nm. The three methods were successfully applied to a pharmaceutical formulation (tablets), and the results were compared with each other.

An investigation of the USP assay of chlorthalidone tablets showed that variable degradation of chlorthalidone occurred during assay preparation. The degradation products were isolated and identified. A stability-indicating high-performance liquid chromatographic (HPLC) assay which separates the degradation products from chlorthalidone was developed and used to examine the present USP preparation. The HPLC assay is suggested as an alternate.

A sensitive and selective gas chromatographic method is described for determining the diuretic and antihypertensive drug chlorthalidone in plasma, urine and erythrocytes. Use is made of an alkali flame ionization detector (nitrogen detector), and the chlorthalidone and internal standard are chromatographed as methyl derivatives. Down to 10 ng of drugs in the biological sample can be measured accurately, with a standard deviation of 5%. Because the concentration of chlorthalidone found in erythrocytes is 50-100 times higher than that in plasma, the influence of haemolysis on the plasma concentration has been investigated. In addition, a pharmacokinetic study with human volunteers revealed that the apparent concentration of the drug found in plasma can be much too low (by more than 50%), if the plasma is not separated from the erythrocytes immediately after venipuncture. Precautions to be observed to ensure correct handling of blood samples (so that results for plasma concentrations will be reliable) are stressed. The findings have application in kinetic studies on chlorthalidone.

A reliable and selective high-pressure liquid chromatographic procedure for the quantitative determination of chlorthalidone in pharmaceutical dosage forms is described. A comparison of this stability-indicating procedure with the USP spectrophotometric assay is presented for chlorthalidone tablets and chlorhalidone tablets containing reserpine.