Testing hair for pharmaceuticals

More than hundred pharmaceuticals, drugs of abuse or doping agents have bee n reported to be detectable in human hair. This article reviews the analysi s of 90 drugs and drug metabolites by chromatographic procedures, including the pretreatment steps, the extraction methods, the reported limits of det ection and the measured concentrations in real human hair samples. Some pro gress is observed in the detection of low dose drugs, like fentanyl or flun itrazepam. The general tendency in the last years, to highly sophisticated techniques (GC-MS-NCI HPLC-MS, GC-MS-MS) illustrates well this constant tig ht for sensitivity. Some new findings, based on the recent experience of th e authors, are also added. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.