title: Fast screening of lovastatin in red yeast rice products by flow injection tandem mass spectrometry.
abstract: Drug adulteration in dietary supplement materials is a world-wide problem and poses a regulatory challenge. Red yeast rice is a product used by consumers to lower blood levels of cholesterol. While most current methods to analyze red yeast rice are based on HPLC separation with a photo-diode array detector and/or a mass spectrometry detector, which takes 20-40min analysis time per sample, we developed a method to do fast screening of the active compound lovastatin by direct infusion into a mass spectrometer. This method takes under 1min per analysis on the instrument. By using multiple reaction monitoring with five product ions, all the ion ratios of the analyte in the samples are compared with those from the standards for qualitative analysis. The results from this method were compared to the result from the liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry, which uses retention time and one ion ratio as the confirmation criteria. No false positives or false negatives were found among the 12 samples tested. The method also seems to be effective in measuring the lovastatin in red yeast rice semi-quantitatively. This kind of method could be adapted to the screening of other dietary supplement products.
authors.affiliation: Total Diet and Pesticide Research Center, U. S. Food and Drug Administration, 11510 W 80th St., Lenexa, KS 66214, USA. fenhong.Song@fda.hhs.gov
authors.forename: Fenhong
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Song
authors.forename: Aref
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: El-Demerdash
authors.forename: Shwn-Ji Susie H
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.forename: Robert E
authors.initials: RE
authors.lastname: Smith
mesh_terms: D001688:Biological Products / Q000737:chemistry*; D019161:Hydroxymethylglutaryl-CoA Reductase Inhibitors / Q000032:analysis*; D008148:Lovastatin / Q000032:analysis*; D053719:Tandem Mass Spectrometry / Q000379:methods*
chemical_list: D001688:Biological Products; D019161:Hydroxymethylglutaryl-CoA Reductase Inhibitors; C117343:red yeast rice; D008148:Lovastatin