A Rapid Screening Method for Sibutramine Hydrochloride in Natural Herbal Medicines and Dietary Supplements.
Int J Anal Chem 2021;
2021:8889423. [PMID:
34484342 PMCID:
PMC8413021 DOI:
10.1155/2021/8889423]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/03/2020] [Revised: 04/25/2021] [Accepted: 07/31/2021] [Indexed: 11/24/2022] Open
Abstract
Herbal weight loss drugs are becoming more widely used in the fight against obesity, but ineffective regulation of these products have resulted in harmful additives. These products may contain adulterants such as sibutramine hydrochloride that may result in serious adverse health events including death. This work established a color precipitation reaction-based rapid screening method for illegal adulteration of sibutramine hydrochloride in natural herbal medicines (NHM) and dietary supplements (DS). While a variety of chromatography- and electrophoresis-based systems have been reported to measure this analyte, they generally suffer from high costs, complicated sample preparation, and a costly analytical infrastructure. In contrast, we present a simple, handheld kit to assay for sibutramine. The performance metrics of this tool include an average detection time of approximately 3 minutes, which is markedly shorter than conventional methods (HPLC or HPLC-MS, etc.), a detection limit of 0.1 mg per aliquot, and an accuracy of 99.02% (n = 820). More strikingly, the sensitivity is 100% (n = 278), and the specificity is 98.52% (n = 542). The rapid test kit developed from this screening method was evaluated by FDA. In summary, this screening method is a rapid, simple, and low-cost tool for the detection of sibutramine in NHM and DS with superior selectivity and sensitivity. For these reasons, this method is especially suitable for underdeveloped settings because it can be employed onsite without any instrumentation. In addition, this approach could rapidly exclude most of the negative samples to boost efficiency in large-scale samples assay. If necessary, positive samples can undergo further alternate testing methods to confirm the positive results of sibutramine hydrochloride content.
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