COMPARATIVE-STUDY OF THE DETERMINATION OF BUPIVACAINE IN HUMAN PLASMABY GAS-CHROMATOGRAPHY MASS-SPECTROMETRY AND HIGH-PERFORMANCE LIQUID-CHROMATOGRAPHY

A comparison was made between high-performance liquid chromatography ( HPLC) and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) as methods for determining bupivacaine in human plasma. Both methods utilized pentyca ine as an internal standard, were found to be linear in the range 5-32 0 ng and had acceptable precision and accuracy. The precision for the HPLC method was better than that for the GC-MS method. The limits of d etection of the HPLC and GC-MS methods were ca. 1.0 and 0.1 ng, respec tively. Good agreement between the HPLC and GC-MS methods was obtained for the analysis of samples taken from a patient receiving bupivacain e topically. For most purposes the HPLC method would be slightly bette r. However, for samples containing interfering peaks GC-MS provides a higher degree of resolution from such interferants.