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

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 greater than or equal to 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 less than 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.