Simultaneous determination of twelve biogenic amines in human urine as potential biomarkers of inflammatory bowel diseases by capillary electrophoresis - tandem mass spectrometry

Biogenic amines (BA) are a broad group of biologically active substances, the presence of which in the human body can provide important diagnostic information for many various pathologies, including chronic inflammation. In this work, a capillary electrophoresis (CE) hyphenated with tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) method was developed for the simultaneous determination of twelve BA (histamine, serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, epinephrine, putrescine, cadaverine, spermine, spermidine, tyramine, tryptamine, phenylethylamine) in human urine as potential biomarkers of inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD). The electrophoretic separations were carried out in an uncoated fused silica capillary (I.D. 50 mu m) using 50 mM formic acid (pH 2.0) as a background electrolyte. A reliable identification of the analytes was based on the combination of time resolution in CE and mass resolution in triple quadrupole MS/MS. The total analysis time of the proposed CE-MS/MS method was less than 10 min with the limits of detection in the range of 4.47-144 ng/mL. The intra- and inter-day accuracy ranged in the intervals 89.75-109.4% and 89.99-110.2%, respectively, with the RSD values for the intra- and inter-day precision lower than 14 and 13 %, respectively. The recovery values for the samples spiked at three concentration levels ranged from 81.73-105.6% with a precision not exceeding 9.9 %. The favorable performance parameters of the CE-MS/MS method highlighted its usefulness for routine clinical applications. In this work, the CE-MS/MS method was applied, for the first time, to the analytical profiling of the BA in clinical human samples. The obtained results showed a statistically significant decrease of serotonin and norepinephrine, and an increase of histamine and spermidine, in the studied group of IBD patients when compared with the control group. These findings could be utilized in studying and clarifying the mechanisms of IBD or relevant therapy. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.