The Potential of Various Living Tissues for Monitoring Clenbuterol Abuse in Food-Producing Chinese Simmental Beef Cattle

Abstract

We aimed to evaluate whether living tissues such as urine, plasma and hair were suitable for monitoring clenbuterol (CL) abuse after its subchronic administration of a growth-promoting dose to the Chinese Simmental beef cattle. Eight male, white and red pied Chinese Simmental beef cattle were involved in the experiment, and the CL dose was 16 µg/kg BW/day. Liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS-MS) was used to determine CL residues in different tissues, and the addition of D9-clenbuterol internal standard was applied to increase determination accuracy. The recovery of plasma, urine, hair and in vivo tissues was 88.5-114.2, 83.9-114.3, 88.6-116.9 and 85.3-121.7%, respectively. The results showed that CL residue concentrations in the plasma, on Days 14 after withdrawal and later, were lower than the limit of detection (LOD) (0.06 ng/mL) and CL residue in urine was lower than LOD (0.16 ng/mL) 42 days after treatment. CL significantly accumulated in the white and red hair and maintained more than 7.19 ± 2.19 pg/mg within the early withdrawal period of 70 days. A large number of CL were determined in all tested biological tissues, in which residues were higher than the maximum residue limits (MRLs) after dietary administration of CL for 21 days and pre-slaughter withdrawal period of ∼6 h. A particular concern is the slow depletion of residues of CL in some tissues like gluteus and liver still exceeding theirs MRLs, respectively, on Days 14 or 28 days after withdrawal. Our study indicated that plasma and urine could be available for monitoring CL abuse only within a short period of time. However, hair (including light-pigmented) as a target matrix can be selected to perform the long-period monitor of CL.