Full validation and application of an ultra high performance liquid chromatographic-tandem mass spectrometric procedure for target screening and quantification of 34 antidepressants in human blood plasma as part of a comprehensive multi-analyte approach.

Multi-analyte procedures are of great interest in clinical and forensic toxicology making the analytical process much simpler, faster, and cheaper and allow monitoring of analytes of different drug classes in one single body sample. The aim of the present study was to validate an ultra high performance liquid chromatographic-tandem mass spectrometric approach for fast target screening and quantification of 34 antidepressants in plasma after simple liquid-liquid extraction as part of a multi-analyte procedure for over 130 drugs. The validation process including recovery, matrix effects, process efficiency, ion suppression/enhancement of co-eluting analytes (already published), selectivity, cross talk, accuracy and precision, stabilities, and limits of quantification and detection showed that the approach was selective, sensitive, accurate, and precise for 28 of the 34 tested drugs. The applicability was successfully tested by analyzing authentic plasma samples and external quality control samples. Furthermore, it could be shown that time- and cost-saving one-point calibration was applicable for 21 drugs for daily routine and especially in emergency cases.