A rapid determination of propiverine and its N-oxide metabolite in human plasma by high performance liquid chromatography–electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry

A simple, fast and sensitive high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC)–electrospray ionization (ESI) tandem mass spectrometric method (LC–MS/MS) has been developed for determination of propiverine and propiverine N-oxide metabolite in human plasma using oxybutynin as internal standard. Instead of extracting propiverine from plasma using organic solvents, which should be separated from the aqueous phase and evaporated before injecting the sample into the chromatograph, plasma sample containing propiverine and N-oxide was directly injected after precipitating proteins with acetonitrile. Numerous compounds in the plasma did not interfere with the highly specific multiple reaction monitoring in tandem mass spectrometric detection following C8 reversed-phase chromatographic separation under conditions that eluted propiverine, N-oxide and oxybutynin within 2 min (0.1% formic acid in water/acetonitrile, 25:75, v/v). The LC–MS/MS method and an alternative LC–MS method, using methyl-t-butyl ether extraction and selected ion monitoring, were validated over 1–250 ng ml−1 of propiverine and 2 to 500 ng ml−1 of N-oxide, and successfully applied in a pharmacokinetic study. The lower limit of quantitation was 1 ng ml−1 for propiverine and 2 ng ml−1 for N-oxide in both methods.