Use of hydrogen as a carrier gas for the analysis of steroids with anabolic activity by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry.

Due to the impact in the media and the requirements of sensitivity and robustness, the detection of the misuse of forbidden substances in sports is a really challenging area for analytical chemistry, where any study focused on enhancing the performance of the analytical methods will be of great interest. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the usefulness of using hydrogen instead of helium as a carrier gas for the analysis of anabolic steroids by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry with electron ionization. There are several drawbacks related with the use of helium as a carrier gas: it is expensive, is a non-renewable resource, and has limited availability in many parts of the world. In contrast, hydrogen is readily available using a hydrogen generator or high-pressure bottled gas, and allows a faster analysis without loss of efficiency; nevertheless it should not be forgotten that due to its explosiveness hydrogen must be handled with caution. Throughout the study the impact of the change of the carrier gas will be evaluated in terms of: performance of the chromatographic system, saving of time and money, impact on the high vacuum in the analyzer, changes in the fragmentation behaviour of the analytes, and finally consequences for the limits of detection achieved with the method.

Automated sample preparation and gas chromatographic-mass spectrometric analysis of urinary androgenic anabolic steroids.

This paper presents an automated method for extracting anabolic agents from urine samples for their GC-MS analysis by selected-ion monitoring. The sample preparation was carried out in a Hewlett-Packard 7686 SPE PrepStation system. Each 0.6-ml aliquot was hydrolyzed, extracted, dried and trimethylsilyl (TMS) derivatized in a 2-ml vial without any hands-on labor. When sample preparation was finished 2 microl of the extract was injected into the gas chromatograph by split (1:10) mode. Due to the small amount of free space in the 2-ml vials for handling the sample, parameters like time of hydrolysis, type of shaking, number of extractions and some TMS derivatization parameters had to be adjusted to achieve the best recovery for all of the compounds in the screening. Manual and automated sample preparation schemes were compared in terms of linearity, precision, accuracy, limit of detection and recovery data. When large concentrations were analyzed using the automated method no carry-over effect was observed.