Detection of sibutramine in adulterated dietary supplements using attenuated total reflectance-infrared spectroscopy

Sibutramine is one of the most occurring adulterants encountered in dietary supplements with slimming as indication. These adulterated dietary supplements often contain a herbal matrix. When customs intercept these kind of supplements it is almost impossible to discriminate between the legal products and the adulterated ones, due to misleading packaging. Therefore in most cases these products are confiscated and send to laboratories for analysis. This results inherently in the confiscation of legal, non-adulterated products. Therefore there is a need for easy to use equipment and techniques to perform an initial screening of samples. Attenuated total reflectance-infrared (ATR-IR) spectroscopy was evaluated for the detection of sibutramine in adulterated dietary supplements. Data interpretation was performed using different basic chemometric techniques. It was found that the use of ATR-IR combined with the k-Nearest Neighbours (k-NN) was able to detect all adulterated dietary supplements in an external test set and this with a minimum of false positive results. This means that a small amount of legal products will still be confiscated and analyzed in a laboratory to be found negative, but no adulterated samples will pass the initial ATR-IR screening.