Abstract: A method for simultaneous detection of cortisol, cortisone, dehydroepiandrosterone, arachidonoyl ethanolamide, 1-arachidonoyl glycerol, palmitoyl ethanolamide, oleoyl ethanolamide, stearoyl ethanolamide based on high performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry was developed. Furthermore, methanol was used to extract target analytes in the hair and solid phase extraction was used to purify the sample. The simultaneous quantitation was conducted by using atmospheric pressure chemical ionization source with the positive mode and multi-reaction monitoring mode. Under optimized chromatographic conditions, the peak shapes of the 8 analytes are sharp, symmetrical and well-separated. The results indicate that the correlation coefficients of standard curves are greater than 0.99 and limits of quantitation for the eight analytes are among 1.0~25 pg/mg. The recovery is within (100±15)% and intra- and inter-day coefficient variations are less than 15%. The normalized matrix factors are close to 1. The stability and carry over also meet the criterion. The method has good stability and reproducibility. The population analysis results show that the content of cortisol in the hair of HIV-infected people is higher than that of healthy people (P＜0.01), and the content of arachidonoyl ethanolamide is lower (P＜0.001), which suggests that the patient's endocannabinoid system may be abnormal and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis has insufficient negative feedback regulation ability.

Key words: High performance liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry, Hair, Hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, Glucocorticoid, Endocannabinoid