Recent developments about determination of non-selective adrenergic beta blockers in physiological samples

Abstract

Beta adrenergic blockers represent a very important class of drugs that are used worldwide for treating various disorders, usually cardiac diseases. Also, these class of drugs are usually used as a doping agent. For these reasons, in this work are described history of beta blockers, its mechanism of action, pharmacological and side effects, and pharmacokinetics. In addition to, it describes actual state of analysis of these drugs using the most important sample preparation and analysis techniques. Sample preparation techniques, for example liquid-liquid extraction, solid-phase extraction, and solid-phase microextraction have been discussed. Sample preparation is essential to some methods of analysis as High-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and it is coupling with mass spectroscopy (MS), because they have not direct injection. Additionally, other methods of analysis have been studied as Micellar liquid chromatography (MLC), capillary electrophoresis (CE), and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). It has been observed that the reported methods are quite satisfactory for the analyses of beta blockers in physiological samples. Future perspectives in the analysis of beta blockers is the use of HPLC with MS and MLC to detect beta blockers in concentrations of nanogram and picogram.