Simultaneous quantitative measurement of fourteen adrenal steroids by capillary column gas chromatographymass spectrometry, and its clinical application

Abstract Until now, there has been little work covering all of the main native adrenal-cortical steroids in blood. We therefore established a method for the simultaneous quantitative measurement of 14 native adrenal-cortical steroids, which involves capillary column gas chromatographymass spectrometry (GCMS). Serum steroids were purified from serum with the Extrelut® mini-column and then converted into stable derivatives for GCMS by a combination of boronic cyclization and trimethylsilyl and methyloxime derivatization. The sensitivities (with a signal-to-noise ratio ⩾ 7) of our GCMS method ranged from 0.1 to 1.0 ng/ml of serum, and the coefficients of variation of intra- and inter-assays were 19% for each steroid. Our newly devised method involving a capillary column GCMS system has been proven to be a simple and suitable method for a diagnosis requiring simultaneous detection of many native adrenal steroids in clinical practice. the analysis time is only 4 h.