Simultaneous determination of illegal galactagogue adulterants in supplement diets by LC-MS/MS

Recently, for successful lactation, many breastfeeding mothers seek various products, including herbal medicine, dietary supplements, and prescribed medicines, to improve milk production. As demand for galactogogues grows, it is highly possible that pharmaceutical galactogogues may be adulterated with illegal products to maximize their efficacy. For continuous control and supervision of illegal products, we developed and validated a simple and sensitive LC-MS/MS method capable of simultaneously determining five galactogogues. Chromatographic separation was conducted using an Agilent Poroshell 120 SB-C-18 column with a mobile phase consisting of 20 mM ammonium formate (pH 5.4) and 100 % acetonitrile. The total run time was 13 min per analyte. The proposed method was performed according to the guidelines of the International Conference of Harmonization and it produced reliable results. This method showed high sensitivity and specificity, with a limit of detection (LOD) and limit of quantitation (LOQ) of 0.01-0.82 ng/mL and 0.02-2.45 ng/mL, respectively, for the solid-and liquid-type samples. Specificity was evaluated by analyzing matrix-blank samples spiked with the target compounds at LOQ levels, which provided a good separation of all peaks without interference. Additionally, the repeatability and intermediate precision were typically < 15 %, whereas the recovery was 80-120 % of the values obtained using blank samples. Thus, we concluded that this method could be used for the identification and quantification of galactogogues in food or herbal products.