THE DETERMINATION OF DEBRISOQUINE AND ITS 4-HYDROXY METABOLITE IN URINE BY CAPILLARY GAS-CHROMATOGRAPHY AND HIGH-PERFORMANCE LIQUID-CHROMATOGRAPHY

A comparative evaluation of capillary gas chromatography and high performance liquid chromatography for the determination of debrisoquine (D) and 4-hydroxydebrisoquine (4HOD) in human urine was undertaken to determine which is the better method to use for routine analysis with emphasis on reproducibility, selectivity and sensitivity. The results show that although GC is more sensitive than HPLC with UV detection it is comparable to HPLC with fluorescence detection. HPLC is simpler and requires very little sample clean-up, while GC requires sample clean-up, derivatization and extraction which is tedious and time consuming. The chromatographic HPLC analysis is completed in less than 10 minutes while the GC procedure takes about twice that time. Overall, the HPLC procedure using fluorescence detection, is selective, simple, fast and gives reproducible results. The HPLC sensitivity for both D and 4HOD, using fluorescence detection is 25 mug/L which is adequate for studies involving phenotyping of human populations.