Summary
Steroid hormones play a major role in many physiological and biochemical processes including regulation of metabolism, immune system func tions, inflammation, development of primary and secondary sexual characteristics and neuroendocrine response during stress. Significant changes in steroid hormone levels can cause variety of endocrine disorders, such as Cushing’s syndrome, Addison’s disease, hypo gonadism or primary polycystic ovary syndrome. For these reasons steroid hormone research is important in daily clinical practice and for scientific research. Blood serum and urine are currently the matrices that are most commonly used for steroid hormone concentration measurements in clinical laboratories. Despite of that, the interest towards steroid hormones in human hair and saliva samples is rapidly increasing. Determination of steroid hormone levels in saliva, blood serum or urine is important for the evaluation of acute or short-term changes in steroid hormone secretion. One of the major advantages of saliva as a sample for steroid hormone analysis is that only free (non- pro teinbound), biologically active fraction of circulating hormones is determined. On the other hand, the information about the long-term changes in steroid hormone levels can be obtained with steroid hormone level measurements in human hair. Therefore, investigation of steroid hormones in hair samples provides the possibility of retrospective evaluation of steroid hormones secretion 1–6 months prior the analysis. Due to the high demand for steroid hormone analyses in non- traditional samples such as saliva and hair, improvements in existing methods as well as development of more efficient sample preparation and steroid hormone extraction techniques are one of the most challenging tasks in recent studies. Moreover, more often attention is focused on the optimization and implementation of more sensitive and specific analytical methods (e.g. high- performance liquid chromatography- tandem mass spectrometry) for steroid analysis in human hair and saliva samples. Therefore, the main purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the most relevant developments in sample preparation techniques as well as to compare different analytical methods for the quantitative determination of steroid hormones in human saliva and hair samples.
