Current role of liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry in clinical toxicology screening methods

Toxicological screening is the analysis of a biological specimen to detect and identify compounds in patients admitted to the hospital with acute intoxication of unknown origin. The screening of a wide range of toxicologically relevant compounds in biological samples is a serious challenge for clinical laboratories. The high selectivity and sensitivity of liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry or tandem mass spectrometry technology provides an attractive alternative to the current methods. For these reasons, an increasing number of applications for multi-target screening or general screening of unknown compounds in biological matrices are being published. This paper is an overview of sample clean-up, chromatographic separation and mass spectrometry detection procedures which can be combined to obtain screening methods adapted to the constraints and needs of various laboratories, and none specifically in clinical toxicology. Currently the techniques are in the hands of specialists, principally in academic institutes. However, the evolution in technology should allow application of the techniques as a tool in toxicology laboratories and thus more widespread exploitation of their potential.