Simultaneous determination of atropine, scopolamine, and anisodamine from Hyoscyamus niger L. in rat plasma by high-performance liquid chromatography with tandem mass spectrometry and its application to a pharmacokinetics study

In order to investigate the pharmacokinetics of tropane alkaloids in Hyoscyamus niger L., a sensitive and specific high-performance liquid chromatography with tandem mass spectrometry method for the simultaneous determination of atropine, scopolamine, and anisodamine in rat plasma is developed and fully validated, using homatropine as an internal standard. The separation of the four compounds was carried out on a BDS Hypersil? C-18 column using a mobile phase consisting of acetonitrile and water (containing 10mmol ammonium acetate). Calibration curves were linear from 0.2 to 40ng/mL for atropine, scopolamine, and from 0.08 to 20ng/mL for anisodamine. The precision of three analytes was <5.89% and the accuracy was between -1.04 to 2.94%. This method is successfully applied to rat pharmacokinetics analysis of the three tropane alkaloids after oral administration of H. niger extract. The maximum concentration of these three tropane alkaloids was reached within 15min, and the maximum concentrations were 31.36 +/- 7.35ng/mL for atropine, 49.94 +/- 2.67ng/mL for scopolamine, and 2.83 +/- 1.49ng/mL for anisodamine. The pharmacokinetic parameters revealed areas under the curve of 22.76 +/- 5.80, 16.80 +/- 3.08, and 4.31 +/- 1.21ng/h mL and mean residence times of 2.08 +/- 0.55, 1.19 +/- 0.45, and 3.28 +/- 0.78h for atropine, scopolamine, and anisodamine, respectively.