International Journal of Legal Medicine

, Volume 128, Issue 1, pp 69–72 | Cite as

Determination of ethyl glucuronide in hair: a rapid sample pretreatment involving simultaneous milling and extraction

Technical Note
First Online:
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Accepted:

Abstract

A combination of simultaneous milling and extraction known as micropulverized extraction was developed for the quantification of the alcohol marker ethyl glucuronide (EtG) in hair samples using a homogeneous reference material and a mixer mill. Best extraction results from 50 mg of hair were obtained with 2-mL plastic tubes containing two steel balls (∅ = 5 mm), 0.5 mL of water and with an oscillating frequency of 30 s−1 over a period of 30 min. EtG was quantified employing a validated GC-MS procedure involving derivatization with pentafluoropropionic acid anhydride. This micropulverization procedure was compared with dry milling followed by separate aqueous extraction and with aqueous extraction after manual cutting to millimeter-size snippets. Micropulverization yielded 28.0 ± 1.70 pg/mg and was seen to be superior to manually cutting (23.0 ± 0.83 pg/mg) and equivalent to dry grinding (27.7 ± 1.71 pg/mg) with regard to completeness of EtG extraction. The option to process up to 20 samples simultaneously makes micropulverization especially valuable for the high throughput of urgent samples.

Keywords

Ethyl glucuronide Hair Micropulverized extraction GC-MS 
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Supplementary material

414_2013_939_MOESM1_ESM.doc (496 kb)
ESM 1 (DOC 496 kb)

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (BAM)BerlinGermany

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