Simultaneous determination of ascaridole, p ‐cymene and α ‐terpinene in rat plasma after oral administration of Chenopodium ambrosioides L. by GC‐MS

A sensitive and reliable GC‐MS method was developed and validated for the simultaneous determination of ascaridole, p ‐cymene and α ‐terpinene in rat plasma using naphthalene as internal standard. The plasma samples were extracted with ethyl acetate. Chromatographic separation was carried out on a HP‐5MS capillary analytical column (30 m × 0.25 mm, 0.25 µm) and detection was performed on a quadrupole mass spectrometer detector operated under selected ion monitoring mode. The method showed excellent linearity over the investigated concentration range ( r  > 0.99) with the limit of quantitation down to 50, 10 and 5 ng/mL for ascaridole, p ‐cymene and α ‐terpinene, respectively. The intra‐day and inter‐day precisions (RSD) were <11.3%, and the accuracy was between 90.7 and 113.8%. The method was successfully applied to investigate the pharmacokinetics of Chenopodium ambrosioides L. following oral administration to rats. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.