Hippuric acid, methylhippuric acid, and mandelic acid are major urine metabolites of aromatic organic solvents (e.g. toluene, xylene, and stylene). Their amounts in urine are most widely used as an indicator of the organic solvent exposure. This note describes a simultaneous determination method for the urinary metabolites and creatinine.
The separation is usually performed with ODS columns using ion-pair reagents. However, it is difficult to achieve good separation of meta- and para- isomers of methylhippuric acid.
In this note, Inertsil ODS-80A, which offers excellent
performance especially in separation of small molecules, was used. As a result, all the analytes were successfully separated within 20 minutes.