[Quantitative determination of drugs by means of gaschromatography. Further development of detectors (author's transl)].

Gaschromatography is an excellent and well established method for the separation of volatile compounds. Up to now the flame ionization detector was used almost exclusively for the quantitative determination of organic compounds separated by gaschromatography. This detector is an unspecific detector and responds to all organic compounds containing at least one C-H bond. Due to that this detector can be used for the determination of almost any drug, however, the chromatographic column must have a very high resolution, especially when small amounts of drugs are to be determined in the presence of large amounts of interfering compounds. As a consequence "substrate specific" detectors were developed, among them the electron capture detector, the nitrogen-phosphor-sensitive detector and the mass spectrometer are the most important ones. The function of these detectors and their advantages for the quantitative determination of drugs are discussed in this paper.