US EPA

8382811 

Journal Article 

Analysis of etizolam, triazolam, nitrazepam and maprotiline in autopsy materials by high-performance liquid chromatography and gas chromatography 

Hama, K; Matsubara, K; Akane, A; Maseda, C; Tanabe, K; Fukui, Y 

1987 

0 

Nippon Hoigaku Zasshi
ISSN: 0047-1887 

41 

1 

45-51 

Japanese 

A woman strangled her sleeping husband and son to death after secretly giving them four psychotropic drugs (etizolam, triazolam, nitrazepam and maprotiline) in coffe. Then she committed suicide by taking an overdose of maprotiline and drowning herself in the river. She had been diagnosed as depressive and received the above drugs from a hospital. By a drug screening test with a mass-chromatograph, only the maprotiline was identified from gastric contents of the woman. Etizolam and triazolam, classified as thienodiazepine and benzodiazepine respectively, are newly commercialized in Japan since 1983 and have strong psychotropic effects with very small doses. The identification and quantification of the drugs were conducted by highly sensitive methods, using high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and gas chromatography with an electron capture detector (GC/ECD). For the purification of the drugs in biological samples from the above cadavers, the extracting technique with n-butylchloride developed in our laboratory was used. Though etizolam and triazolam could not be separated on a chromatogram by capillary GC/ECD, they were successfully determined by HPLC together with nitrazepam. The lower limits of detection in the blood were 2 ng/ml for etizolam, 4 ng/ml for triazolam and 2 ng/ml for nitrazepam. Maprotiline was determined specifically by GC/ECD, using a pre-column injection system after the pentafluoropropionic derivatization. The detection limit for this drug was approximately 1 ng/ml. The proposed HPLC method would be applicable to the measurements of other benzodiazepines in biological specimens.