LC–MS/MS monitoring of 22 illegal antihistamine compounds in health food products from the Korean market

Abstract

With the increasing popularity of dietary supplements, a critical analysis of safety issues concerning their use has become imperative. Despite several regulations and laws being in place, there have been several instances of adulterated health food-induced accidents. Therefore, in light of the growing seriousness of this problem, we attempted to detect the presence of 22 antihistamines in health foods sold in South Korea. 117 samples, representative of the various types of health foods, were screened by liquid chromatography with electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry (LC–ESI–MS/MS). The limit of detections (LODs) and limit of quantifications (LOQs) of the instrument ranged from 0.0003 to 0.3 μg/mL and from 0.0009 to 0.6 μg/mL, respectively. The LODs and LOQs of the method ranged from 0.006 to 6.0 μg/mL and from 0.018 to 12.0 μg/mL, respectively. The calibration curve was linear with R2 between 0.997 and 0.999. The mean recovery efficiency ranged from 89.7 to 111.8 %. On applying our method to screen 117 commercially available samples, we found that 116 samples were not detected targeted compounds and one sample contained diphenhydramine component.