Metabolites Of Poisonous Aconitum Alkaloids

To study Separation and Identification of Aconitum Alkaloids andtheir Metabolites in Human body in order to get a clear theoreticalbasis for developing a new method of forensic identification andclinical tests of aconitine poisoning and some of indicatorcompounds of aconitine poisoning.Aconitum plants is very poisonous in which more than 100di-terpene alkaloids were found. Some of chinese medicines fromAconitum such as Aconitum Carmichaeli, aconitum kusnezoffii andmonkshood , can cure many kinds of diseases (rheumatism,rheumatoid arthritis ,etc).Therefore, they are widely used in clinicand folk. Aconitine is more poisonous than the others , whoselethal dose for humans is about is 0.4mg, its effective dose andpoisoning dose is so close that aconitine poisoning occurs frequentlyin many countries.Aconitine decomposes to other ingredients so quickly that thesedo not detected in human body in many cases .now there is not agood method to identify aconitine poisoning in the world.In this article, a new method for clinical tests and forensicidentification of aconitine poisoning was discussed and aconitinepoisoning can be confirmed through detecting metabolites ofAconitum alkaloids in biologic samples by LC-ESI/MSn.The new method of the pretreatment was improved to detectmore metabolites of Aconitum alkaloids,especially some ingredientsof strongger polarity .Analysising Aconitum alkaloids and their metabolites byLC-ESI/MSn is sensitive and exclusive which needs not complicatedpretreatment.The dubious cases of aconitine poisoning were caused by takingAconitum Carmichaeli , aconitum kusnezoffii and monkshoodgeneraly, and there are some cases caused by taking other Aconitumplants. Aconitum alkaloids and their main metabolites detected byLC-ESI/MSn in body were the most powerful proof of aconitinepoisoning so far.The metabolites of Aconitum alkaloids extracted from 5mlbody liquid or quarter viscera can be detected by LC-ESI/MSn,whose sensitivity is good .The result shows there will be different result in differentpatients taking aconitine because of interindividual variation. Sothe quantitative analysis of metabolites of Aconitum alkaloids inbody is meaningless for the forensic identification.The lethal dose of aconitine for humans is about 0.4mg. However,this dose was fed on a rabbit, metabolites of aconitine can't bedetected because the content is lower than the detective limit or theingredients distribute widely in body. The result showed that ifAconitum alkaloids or their metabolites were detected in body, thecase can be confirm as a result of aconitine poisoning.Metabolite of Aconitum alkaloids can be detected was irrelatedwith sex .Aconitine metabolite can be detected by LC-ESI/MSn in abiologic sample obtained 8 years ago.The method developing in this article is not only used forforensic identification, but also used for clinical tests.Dehydraconine ,demethylaconitine and demethylmesaconitinewere found in body firstly.The achievements and results of this experiments werereported for the first time at home and overseas.