Recent Developments in the Sensitive Electrochemical Assay of Common Opioid Drugs

Abstract

Opioids are a class of drugs used to treat moderate to severe pain and have short-term adverse effects. Nevertheless, they are considered necessary for pain management. However, well-known hazards are connected with an opioid prescription, such as overuse, addiction, and overdose deaths. For example, the death rate from opioid analgesic poisoning in the USA approximately doubled, owing to the overuse and addiction of opioid analgesics. Also, opioids are a very important group of analytes in forensic chemistry, so it is necessary to use reliable, fast, and sensitive analytical tools to determine opioid analgesics. This review focuses on the opioid overdose crisis, the properties of commonly used opioid drugs, their mechanism, effects, and some chromatographic and spectroscopic detection methods are explained briefly. Then most essentially recent developments covering the last ten years in the sensitive electrochemical methods of common opioid analgesics, their innovations and features, and future research directions are presented.

Keywords:

• Common opioid drugs
• detection methods
• electrochemical detection
• opioid overuse

Disclosure statement

The authors declared that they have no conflicts of interest in this work.

Additional information

Funding

This work was produced as a part of Merve Yence’s Ph.D. thesis. Merve Yence thanks the financial supports from Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) under the BIDEB/2211-A Ph.D. Scholarship Programmes and ARDEB/1004 Ph.D. Scholarship Programmes. Ahmet Cetinkaya thanks the financial support from the Council of Higher Education 100/2000 (YOK) under the special 100/2000 and the TUBITAK under the BIDEB/2211-A Ph.D. Scholarship Programmes.