Layered double hydroxides based ion exchange extraction for high sensitive analysis of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs

Abstract Layered double hydroxides (LDHs) are ideal sorbents for solid phase extraction (SPE) because of the excellent ion exchange capacity and high specific surface area. However, difficult elution of the analytes from the LDHs is a problem due to the strong ionic interaction between anions and LDHs. High concentrated NaOH solution is employed to elute the sample, but it not suitable for analyzing by HPLC. To solve this problem, a simple acid-base neutralization method was proposed after elution, and then the neutral samples were directly injected to HPLC for analysis. Nickel-aluminum layered double hydroxides (NiAl-LDHs) were synthesized by co-precipitation method and packed into a micro pipette tip for the extraction of three non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) including ketoprofen, naproxen and flurbiprofen from aqueous samples. After optimization of the experimental parameters such as the concentration of the NaOH, sample pH, sampling rate and sample volume, excellent extraction efficiency towards three NSAIDs was obtained with high enrichment factors of 28–32. A NiAl-LDHs based SPE-HPLC method was developed for quantitative analysis of NSAIDs, and the method showed low limits of detection (0.002–0.1 ng/mL), good linearity (R 2  ≥ 0.9995) and good reproducibility (intraday RSD ≤ 4.37%). The developed method was also applied to the analysis of three NSAIDs in spiked human plasma and rat plasma after oral administration, which demonstrated the practicality of the proposed method.