Emerging trends in pharmacotoxicological and forensic sample treatment procedures

One of the most discussed topics concerns the sample preparation before the analysis and, therefore, all the operations necessary to eliminate the interferents, clean up the specimens, and extract the analytes of interest, reducing the matrix effect. This review highlights the fundamen-tal steps in the treatment of the postmortem samples used in forensic analysis; through critical literature research, it was possible to choose among the countless works that could provide a general overview of the state-of-the-art in this field. Different biological matrices have been considered; blood and urine (the traditional biological fluids) are used to investigate the pres-ence of substances that may have caused death, and other body fluids, such as bile and oral flu-ids, are still under discussion for their usability (and suitability). In the second part of the re-view, all the solid matrices obtained after autopsy were further divided into conventional and unconventional matrices to facilitate proper understanding. The choice of literature was also made according to the most widely used pretreatment techniques and the most representative innovative techniques.