Supervisors info:
Παπουτσής Ιωάννης, Επίκουρος Καθηγητής, Ιατρική Σχολή, Εθνικό και Καποδιστριακό Πανεπιστήμιο Αθηνών
Summary:
Antidepressants are widely used to treat depression and other psychiatric disorders. The main antidepressant drugs used in Greece and which are studied in this master thesis are amitriptyline, nortriptyline, citalopram, clomipramine, fluoxetine, maprotiline, mirtazapine, sertraline and venlafaxine. The use of alternative biological materials in Forensic Toxicology has been highlighted by many researchers, especially in cases of lack of classical biological samples such as blood, urine, etc., in cases of putrefaction or whenever postmortem redistribution of substances is suspected. Vitreous humor is an alternative biological sample that can be used for the analysis of the antidepressant drugs because of its analytical advantages compared to other biological samples.
The purpose of this thesis was to study the distribution of antidepressant drugs in vitreous humor through the determination of concentration ratios of the antidepressant drugs in blood to the respective in vitreous humor. For this reason, an analytical method was developed for the simultaneous determination of these antidepressant drugs as well as four of their metabolites in vitreous humor with the technique of gas chromatography in combination with mass spectrometry. The developed method presents significant advantages over already published methods for the determination of the antidepressant drugs in the vitreous humor using GC/MS technique as it allows the simultaneous determination of 9 antidepressant drugs and 4 of their metabolites. This method was applied to samples of forensic interest in which antidepressant drugs had been detected either during the general unknown analysis of the blood. In all cases where an antidepressant drug was detected in blood samples, the respective antidepressant drug was also found in vitreous humor samples with a significant range in the concentration ratios. The study should be continued with more samples in order to the usefulness of vitreous humor as an alternative biological sample in the investigation of forensic cases to be proven.
Key-words: antidepressant drugs, vitreous humor, gas chromatography, mass spectrometry
Keywords:
antidepressant drugs, vitreous humor, gas chromatography, mass spectrometry
