High throughput analysis of drugs of abuse in hair by combining purposely designed sample extraction compatible with immunometric methods used for drug testing in urine

Drug testing in hair usually requires a rather complex sample treatment before drugs are amenable to analysis by either immunological and/or chromatographic coupled to mass spectrometry methods. Immunological methods applied are usually dedicated to hair analysis as analytes present in this matrix are not always the same present in urine. Comedical s.a.s. laboratories recently commercialized reagents (VMA-T) purposely designed for hair sample treatment which are compatible with current immunometric methods used for urine drug testing. This is possible as some analytes (6-MAM and cocaine) present in hair after sample treatment are converted to those detected in urine (morphine and benzoylecgonine). A correlation study for several drug classes performed in two laboratories with 32 clinical and 12 spiked drug free (controls) hair samples shows that implementation of the method on clinical chemistry analyzers is easy and that results obtained by different operators and instruments are comparable and reproducible. The main advantage of VMA-T method is the possibility to simultaneously extract from hair main drug classes, in a period of time lower than 2 h and its compatibility with immunological methods applied in urine drug testing. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.