An improved fabric phase sorptive extraction method for the determination of five selected antidepressant drug residues in human blood serum prior to high performance liquid chromatography with diode array detection.

Fabric phase sorptive extraction (FPSE), a recently introduced sorbent-based microextraction technique, was applied for the first time in order to achieve a simple and rapid simultaneous extraction of five common antidepressant drug residues (venlafaxine, paroxetine, fluoxetine, amitriptyline and clomipramine) from human blood serum. Elimination of protein precipitation step and minimized solvent consumption led to a sample preparation workflow compliant with the principles of green analytical chemistry (GAC). FPSE utilizes permeable and flexible fabric substrate chemically coated with a sol-gel organic-inorganic hybrid sorbent as the extraction device. Among all the membrane examined, sol-gel polycaprolactone-dimethylsiloxane-polycaprolactone coated polyester substrate presented optimum extraction efficiency and was found to be reusable for at least 30 times. The selected drugs were analyzed and detected by reversed phase high performance liquid chromatography method using gradient elution and a diode array detector operated at 235 nm. Limit of detection was found 0.15 ng μL, while good absolute recoveries (9.4-88.1%) and low relative standard deviations (≤9.2% and ≤ 11.0 for within-day and between-day precision, respectively) were obtained.