Fatal 4-MTA Intoxication: Development of a Liquid Chromatographic-Tandem Mass Spectrometric Assay for Multiple Matrices

Abstract

The case history and toxicological findings of an overdose fatality involving 4-methylthioamphetamine (4-MTA) and 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) are reported along with a description of the analytical method. Detection and quantitation of 4-MTA and MDMA were performed by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry using phentermine as internal standard. Application of this technique to a variety of matrices allowed an insight in the distribution of 4-MTA. Several blood samples including femoral vein blood (5.23 mg/L), urine (95.5 mg/L), vitreous humor (1.31 mg/L), bile (36.4 mg/L), and numerous tissue samples such as liver (30.8 mg/kg), spleen (4.10 mg/kg), and frontal lobe (31.7 mg/kg) were assayed. These values indicated that 4-MTA could be identified as the cause of this fatality, whereas the concentrations of MDMA, also described, are less important because the concentrations found are lower. This case reports, for the first time, an extensive toxicological analysis of 4-MTA, by which the data presented may shed some light on the distribution of 4-MTA.

Plasma vs heart tissue concentration in humans – literature data analysis of drugs distribution

“…However, the 4-MTA heart muscle/ blood ratio only slightly exceeded 1, therefore, 4-MTA might not tend to bind to this tissue. According to the data, the distributions of MDMA and 4-MTA did not fully parallel each other [10].…”

Determination of Illicit Drugs in Urine and Plasma by Micro-SPE Followed by HPLC–MS/MS

“…Many LC-MS methods for the determination of drugs of abuse in plasma have been published, for example, for the determination of cocaine and its metabolites [15,31,32], amphetamines and designer drugs [33]; only few methods for the simultaneous determination of amphetamine, benzoylecgonine and cocaine in plasma have been reported [2,34,35]. Sample pretreatment consisted rarely in a simple protein precipitation (PPT) [30,35]; usually a solid phase extraction (SPE) step is used in addition [2,36,37].…”

Simultaneous analysis of six novel hallucinogenic (tetrahydrobenzodifuranyl)aminoalkanes (FLYs) and (benzodifuranyl)aminoalkanes (DragonFLYs) by GC-MS, LC-MS, and LC-MS-MS

“…LC-MS-MS was then explored for all analytes under the same chromatographic conditions as those used for LC-MS. Figure 7 shows product ion spectra of the analytes at two CEs and schematic diagrams for their fragmentation modes. As is observed for other phenethylamine-type drugs, elimination of an amino moiety was observed at lower CEs, followed by ethylene or bromine desorption at high CE (40 eV) [25,28]. The LODs of the analytes obtained by EPI (CE:15 eV) and SRM analyses are shown in Table 3.…”