Abstract
Chemical Evaluation of ethanol intake that makes a bad influence on human performance in maneuvering aircrafts is essential in air accident investigations. However ethanol within human body becomes too low to detect at a rapid rate due to decrease in ethanol concentration by metabolism. What is worse, postmortem ethanol production by microbial activity is a significant problem which makes it impossible to evaluate whether or not there is an ethanol intake in fetal air accidents.
This study, the liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometric condition (LC/MS/MS) using a pentafluorophenyl column was established for serotonin metabolites, 5-hydroxytryptophol (5-HTOL) and 5-hydroxyindole acetic acid (5-HIAA), the ratio of which is employed as an alcohol biomarker not influenced by microbial ethanol formation. Each limit of detection of 5-HTOL and 5-HIAA without any chemical derivatization was 1ng/mL and 10ng/mL in aqueous solution in this condition. The cut-off value ([5-HTOL]/[5-HIAA] = 0.015) measured by the LC/MS/MS method developed above allowed for identification of human urinary samples to ethanol intake (0.5g/kg body weight) .
