Development and Application of Stir Bar Sorptive Extraction with Polyurethane Foams for the Determination of Testosterone and Methenolone in Urine Matrices

This work describes the development, validation, and application of a novel methodology for the determination of testosterone and methenolone in urine matrices by stir bar sorptive extraction using polyurethane foams [SBSE(PU)] followed by liquid desorption and high-performance liquid chromatography with diode array detection. The methodology was optimized in terms of extraction time, agitation speed, pH, ionic strength and organic modifier, as well as back-extraction solvent and desorption time. Under optimized experimental conditions, convenient accuracy were achieved with average recoveries of 49.7 ± 8.6% for testosterone and 54.2 ± 4.7% for methenolone. Additionally, the methodology showed good precision (< 9%), excellent linear dynamic ranges (> 0.9963) and convenient detection limits (0.2-0.3 µg/L). When comparing the efficiency obtained by SBSE(PU) and with the conventional polydimethylsiloxane phase [SBSE(PDMS)], yields up to four-fold higher are attained for the former, under the same experimental conditions. The application of the proposed methodology for the analysis of testosterone and methenolone in urine matrices showed negligible matrix effects and good analytical performance.