<br/>Passive smoke or (secondhand smoke) is defined as when a non-smoker is unintentionally exposed to a smoking environment from cigarettes, cigars, or pipes. Passive smoke can result in adverse health effects leading to heart disease, asthma attacks, lung cancer, and other major epidemic diseases. Smoke from active smokers has been extensively studied. These studies have examined a number of methods for the analysis of nicotine and its metabolites. In contrast the development of methods to follow nicotine and its metabolites in those exposed to passive or secondhand smoke is lacking. Here we present a method developed for the determination of nicotine in toenails. We will describe a method that involves the pretreatment of toenails, followed by a liquid-liquid extraction. The extract is then analyzed by reverse phase high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) – mass spectrometry. Some of the figures of merit for this method include quantification of the nicotine concentration level, standard curve linearity (R<sup>2</sup> &gt; 0.99), limit of detection (LOD = 8 µg/L at m/z 163), limit of quantitation (LOQ = 10 µg/L), over the concentration range of 10 to 2000 µg/L. Toenail samples were collected for research purposes, including two conditions: non-smoker/no secondhand smoke exposure and non-smoker, but exposed to secondhand smoke. The results indicted a nicotine content in the no secondhand smoke exposed samples and the secondhand smoke exposed toenail samples are 0.0702 ng/mg and 0.109 ng/mg, respectively.

Determination of nicotine in toenails as a biomarker for secondhand smoke by LC-MS

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

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