Ephedrines are widely used in therapy. Because of their stimulant properties, these substances are relevant in different forensic fields. At present, the state of the art for ephedrines quantification relay based on a liquid chromatography mass spectrometry, mainly because of the dilute-and-shoot approach. Notwithstanding, several gas chromatography based methods have already been described, all of them include cleanup steps, with the potential disadvantage of incurring errors and increasing the workload. In this paper, a straightforward method for ephedrine quantification based on gas chromatographic mass spectrometry, without cleanup and based on Doehlert matrix optimization is presented. Only 10 µL of a urine sample is necessary and for N-methyl-N-(trimethylsilyl)trifluoroacetamide/N-methyl-bis-trifluoracetamide derivatives, the intermediate precision was 2.77% for ephedrine, 9.20% for cathine, 8.29% for norephedrine and 4.27% for pseudoephedrine. The limit of detection was 20 ng mL-1 for ephedrine, 30 ng mL-1 for cathine and 40 ng mL-1 for norephedrine and pseudoephedrine.

<p>Luteinizing hormone (LH) can be used by athletes as an alternative way to take illicit advantage of androgenic effects, since it stimulates the secretion of testosterone by the Leydig cells. As consequence, LH use is illegal for male athletes and the hormone is included in the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) prohibited list. Since LH is an endogenous substance, the strategy used to allow the detection of LH abuse was the establishment of a reference value. All analyses were developed by IMMULITE^®, which was submitted to a complete validation performance with urine. The hormone showed to be stable at 4 °C and -20 °C for at least 40 days and for 10 days at room temperature and unstable after the second cycle of freezing and thawing. The reference population of male Brazilian athletes showed a cut-off value of 37.4 mIU mL-1. The results indicate the assay is suitable for application in doping control analysis.</p>