Comparison of dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction and hollow fiber liquid-liquid-liquid microextraction for the determination of fentanyl, alfentanil, and sufentanil in water and biological fluids by high-performance liquid chromatography

Dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction (DLLME) and hollow fiber liquid-liquid-liquid microextraction (HF-LLLME) combined with HPLC-DAD have been applied for the determination of three narcotic drugs (alfentanil, fentanyl, and sufentanil) in biological samples (human plasma and urine). Different DLLME parameters influencing the extraction efficiency such as type and volume of the extraction solvent and the disperser solvent, concentration of NaOH, and salt addition were investigated. In the HF-LLLME, the effects of important parameters including organic solvent type, concentration of NaOH as donor solution, concentration of H2SO4 as acceptor phase, salt addition, stirring rate, temperature, and extraction time were investigated and optimized. The results showed that both extraction methods exhibited good linearity, precision, enrichment factor, and detection limit. Under optimal condition, the limits of detection ranged from 0.4 to 1.9 mu g/L and from 1.1 to 2.3 mu g/L for DLLME and HF-LLLME, respectively. For DLLME, the intra- and inter-day precisions were 1.7-6.4% and 14.2-15.9%, respectively; and for HF-LLLME were 0.7-5.2% and 3.3-10.1%, respectively. The enrichment factors were from 275 to 325 and 190 to 237 for DLLME and HF-LLLME, respectively. The applicability of the proposed methods was investigated by analyzing biological samples. For analysis of human plasma and urine samples, HF-LLLME showed higher precision, more effective sample clean-up, higher extraction efficiency, lower organic solvent consumption than DLLME.