Simultaneous extraction of acetylsalicylic acid and salicylic acid from human plasma and simultaneous estimation by liquid chromatography and atmospheric pressure chemical ionization/tandem mass spectrometry detection

Abstract A simple analytical method using liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) in atmospheric chemical ionization mode (APCI) for the simultaneous estimation of acetylsalicylic acid (ASA, CAS 50-78-2) and its active metabolite salicylic acid (SA, CAS 69-72-7) in human plasma has been developed and validated. ASA and SA were analyzed simultaneously despite differences in plasma concentration ranges of ASA and SA after oral administration of ASA. In spite of having different chemical, ionization and chromatographic properties, ASA and SA were extracted simultaneously from the plasma sample using acetonitrile protein precipitation followed by liquid-liquid extraction. The analytes were separated on a reversed phase column with rapid gradient program using mobile phase consisting of ammonium acetate buffer and methanol. The structural analogue diclofenac was used as an internal standard. The multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) transitions m/z 179 → 137 for ASA, m/z 137 → 65 for SA and m/z 294 → 250 for IS were used. The assay exhibited a linear dynamic range of 0.02–10 μg/mL for ASA and 0.1–50 μg/mL for SA. The between-batch precision (%CV) ranged from 2.1 to 7.9% for ASA and from 0.2 to 5.2% for SA. The between-batch accuracy ranged from 95.4 to 96.7% for ASA and from 94.6 to 111.3% for SA. The validated method was successfully applied for the evaluation of pharmacokinetics of ASA after single oral administration of 650 mg test formulation versus two 325 mg reference formulations of ASA in human subjects.