Abstract
Angelica sinensis (danggui in Chinese) is a common traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), and its essential oil has been used for the treatment of many diseases such as hepatic fibrosis. Z‐Ligustilide has been found to be an important active component in the TCM essential oil. In this work, for the first time, headspace single‐drop microextraction (HS‐SDME) followed by gas chromatography‐mass spectrometry (GC‐MS) was developed for the determination of Z‐ligustilide in rabbit plasma after oral administration of essential oil of danggui. The extraction parameters of solvent selection, solvent volume, sample temperature, extraction time, stirring rate, and ion strength were systemically optimized. Furthermore, the method linearity, detection limit, and precision were also investigated. It was shown that the proposed method provided good linearity (0.02–20 μg/mL, R^2^ = 0.997), low detection limit (10 ng/mL), and good precision (RSD value less than 9%). Finally, HS‐SDME followed by GC/MS was used for fast determination of Z‐ligustilide in rabbit plasma at different time intervals after oral administration of danggui essential oil. The experimental results suggest that HS‐SDME followed by GC/MS is a simple, sensitive, and low‐cost method for the determination of Z‐ligustilide in plasma, and a low‐cost approach to pharmacokinetics studies of active components in TCMs.