Citation

Kuwayama K, Miyaguchi H, Kanamori T, Tsujikawa K, Yamamuro T, Segawa H, Okada Y, Iwata YT. Drug Test. Anal. 2021; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2021, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1002/dta.3025

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

To prove drug-related crimes, it is important to estimate the date on which a specific drug was ingested. Previously, we developed a method, "micro-segmental hair analysis," to estimate the day of ingestion of a single-dose drug by segmenting a hair strand into 0.4-mm segments, which correspond to daily hair growth. In this study, the method was improved to estimate the days of continuous drug ingestion. The subjects ingested four hay-fever medicines (fexofenadine, epinastine, cetirizine, and loratadine) continuously (1-18 days) and chlorpheniramine as a single dose at intervals of several weeks as an internal temporal marker (ITM). The hair strands of the subjects were collected and subjected to a micro-segmental analysis. The distribution curves of each hay-fever medicine in a hair strand had broad peaks reflecting the number of days of drug ingestion. The positions on the curves corresponding to the first and final ingestion days of hay-fever medicines were identified using the ITM. The positions were near the hair segments on both ends of full width at half maximum (W(2) ) of the broad peak. When the first and final days of continuous ingestion were estimated using W(2) , independent of peak shape, the absolute average error from the actual ingestion days was approximately 2 days. Overall, we established a method to estimate the days of both single-dose and continuous drug ingestions. Furthermore, the method would be useful to investigate drug ingestion history in various scenes such as drug-related crimes and therapeutic drug monitoring.

Language: en

Keywords

drug; distribution; hair; LC/MS; segmental analysis