Analysis of seven selected antidepressant drugs in post–mortem samples using fabric phase sorptive extraction followed by high performance liquid chromatography-photodiode array detection

Fabric phase sorptive extraction (FPSE), a recently introduced microextraction technique, was herein applied for the first time to achieve a simple and rapid simultaneous extraction of seven common antidepressant drugs (ADs, venlafaxine, citalopram, paroxetine, fluoxetine, sertraline, amitriptyline, and clomipramine) in post–mortem samples, particularly whole blood and cerebrospinal liquor collected during autopsies. By eliminating the protein precipitation step and reducing solvent consumption, this technique resulted in sample preparation compliant with Green Analytical Chemistry (GAC) principles. FPSE uses a permeable and flexible substrate chemically coated with a sol–gel organic/inorganic sorbent as an extraction device. Among all tested FPSE membranes, the sol-gel Carbowax 20M (sol-gel CW 20M) coating on cellulose substrate showed optimal extraction efficiency for ADs. The selected drugs were analyzed and detected by the reverse phase high performance liquid chromatography (RP–HPLC) method coupled to photo diode array (PDA) detector. An isocratic elution that allows the complete separation of all analytes in only 20 min of chromatographic run time was applied using ammonium acetate buffer as aqueous mobile phase and acetonitrile (AcN) as the organic modifier. The limit of detection (LOD) ranged from 0.04 to 0.06 µg/mL, whereas limit of quantification (LOQ) was 0.1 µg/mL for all analytes except for Venlafaxine, which was 0.2 µg/mL.