A sensitive method, based on liquid chromatography-electrospray ionisation-mass spectrometry (LC-ESI-MS), was developed for the determination of trimetazidine in human plasma. Buflomedil was used as the internal standard (IS). Plasma samples were extracted with a mixture of cyclohexane-diethyl ether (1:1, v/v) and the analytes were chromatographically separated on a phenomenex Luna 5 mu C18 (2) 100A HPLC column with a mobile phase of 10 mM ammonium acetate buffer solution containing 0.1% acetic acid-methanol (45:55, v/v). The electrospray ionization was employed in a single quadrupole mass spectrometer for the analytical determination. The lower limit of quantification (LLOQ) was 0.5 ng/ml for trimetazidine and the measuring ranges were from 0.5 to 200 ng/ml. The intra- and inter-run standard deviation was less than 4.1% and 7.8%, respectively. The method was successfully applied to study the pharmacokinetics of trimetazidine in healthy Chinese volunteers.