Abstract
Quantitative determination of catecholamines and their O-methyl metabolites (metanephrines) plays an important role in the diagnosis of pheochromocytoma (PHEO) - adrenal medulla tumour. The most common symptom of this kind of tumour is hypertension (high blood pressure).
PHEO synthesizes, stocks, metabolizes and mostly secretes catecholamines. For this reason it is possible to use significantly elevated concentrations of catecholamines and their metabolic products as diagnostic markers of this tumour.
The determination of metanephrines, mainly normetanephrine (NMN), metanephrine (MN) and 3-methoxytyramine (3-MT), is preferred against the determination of catecholamines because tumour cells produce free metanephrines continuously and irrespective of the release of catecholamines. The project aims to develop a new kit for the determination of plasma metanephrines.
Solid phase extraction (SPE) is used for the pre-treatment of plasma samples. The determination is performed by ion-pair ultra-high performance liquid chromatography with electrochemical detection (UHPLC-ED).