LC-MS based analysis of endogenous steroid hormones in human hair

W. Gao, C. Kirschbaum, J. Grass, T. Stalder

Abstract

The quan­tifi­ca­tion of en­doge­nous steroid hor­mone con­cen­tra­tions in hair is in­creas­ingly used as a method for ob­tain­ing ret­ro­spec­tive in­for­ma­tion on long-term in­te­grated hor­mone ex­po­sure. Sev­eral dif­fer­ent an­a­lyt­i­cal pro­ce­dures have been em­ployed for hair steroid analy­sis, with liq­uid chro­matog­ra­phy-mass spec­trom­e­try (LC-MS) being rec­og­nized as a par­tic­u­larly pow­er­ful an­a­lyt­i­cal tool. Sev­eral method­olog­i­cal as­pects af­fect the per­for­mance of LC-MS sys­tems for hair steroid analy­sis, in­clud­ing sam­ple prepa­ra­tion and pre­treat­ment, steroid ex­trac­tion, post-in­cu­ba­tion pu­rifi­ca­tion, LC method­ol­ogy, ion­iza­tion tech­niques and MS spec­i­fi­ca­tions. Here, we crit­i­cally re­view the dif­fer­en­tial value of such pro­to­col vari­ants for hair steroid hor­mones analy­sis, fo­cus­ing on both an­a­lyt­i­cal qual­ity and prac­ti­cal fea­si­bil­ity is­sues. Our re­sults show that, when method­olog­i­cal chal­lenges are ad­e­quately ad­dressed, LC-MS pro­to­cols can not only yield ex­cel­lent sen­si­tiv­ity and speci­ficity but are also char­ac­ter­ized by rel­a­tively sim­ple sam­ple pro­cess­ing and short run times. This makes LC-MS based hair steroid pro­to­cols par­tic­u­larly suit­able as a high-qual­ity op­tion for rou­tine ap­pli­ca­tion in re­search con­texts re­quir­ing the pro­cess­ing of larger num­bers of sam­ples.