Simultaneous determination of β-phenylethylamine, tyramine and tryptamine in urines by means of dansylation

Abstract

A specific and sensitive method for the simultaneous determination of β-phenylethylamine, tyramine and tryptamine, in their non-conjugated forms in human urine was described.
These amines were extracted with ethyl acetate from 20ml of urine at pH 12.0 and dansylated overnight in the dark place. Dansyl derivatives were separated by the two dimentional thin layer chromatography. Dansyl-β-phenylethylamine, dansyl-tyramine and dansyl-tryptamine were removed from the plate under the ultraviolet light and analyzed by the fluorometric procedure.
The authors determined urinary excretion levels of β-phenylethylamine, tyramine, tryptamine in healthy male and female subjects by this method. Urinary excretion levels of β-phenylethylamine were 11.4 μg/24 hours in male and 13.6 μg/24 hours in female. Tyramine excretion levels were 543 μg/24 hours in male and 621μg/24 hours in female. Tryptamine excretion levels were 69.7 μg/24 hours in male and 121 μg/24 hours in female.
The effect of bitter-sweet chocolate ingestion (85-140g) on the urinary excretion of these amines was also tested, since the chocolate contains a large amount of ft-phenyl-ethylamine (500μg PEA·HCl/100g). The chocolate ingestion caused no remarkable changes in urinary contents of β-phenylethylamine, tyramine and tryptamine in twenty four hours.