| Objective physiological index is very helpful for clinical diagnose of Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Previous research found that PTSD was closely associated with cortisol, testosterone, dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA), progesterone, and cortisone. It inferred that steroids would be potential biomarkers of PTSD clinical diagnose.The present study aimed to improve the previous LC-APCI-MS/MS method for simultaneous detection of the five steroids in hair. It optimized experiment parameters and decreased the usage of sample weight and improved limit of detection.20-mg hair samples were washed and then incubated during permanent room temperature for 24 h. After SPE process samples were injected into machine for analysis. LOD are 0.25 pg/mg for cortisol and cortisone, and 0.125 pg/mg for testosterone and progesterone, 1.25 pg/mg for DHEA. Intra-day and inter-day imprecisions were less than 10%, and recovery were between 81-115%.Participants in the present study were sixty-four female survivors who suffered from Wenchuan earthquake and whose children were lost in the earthquake. Of these, 32 participants were PTSD patients and the 32 participants were non-PTSD as controls. Their hair strands with long than 12 cm in the posterior vertex were collected as close as possible to the scalp. The hair samples were cut into 4 segments with 3-cm per segment. Results revealed that there were no differences in the five steroid hormones between PTSD and non-PTSD groups. This indicated that steroids secretion of PTSD patients was recovered to normal level since time passed after traumatic accident outburst. In addition, steroid hormone concentrations have a steady decrease along the hair shaft from the proximal segment closest to the scalp to the distal end. |
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