Comparative study on determination of lead in blood by flame and flameless atomic absorption spectrophotometry with and without wet dignestion

Summary

Two series of lead-containing human blood samples, one series of 53 samples of blood impregnated with lead nitrate at various concentrations up to 100 µg/dl, and the other series of 50 samples obtained from lead-exposed workers and containing lead up to 70 µg/dl, were analyzed by the following three methods of different analytical principles; 1) the flame atomic absorption spectrophotometry after wet digestion, 2) the direct chelation-extraction (avoiding wet digestion; Hessel, 1968) followed by flame atomic absorption spectrophotometry, and 3) the flameless atomic absorption spectrophotometry. The results were compared mutually and also with those from 4) the automated analysis (Ikeda et al., 1977).It was proved that good agreements in measured values exist between any pair of the analytical methods out of the four, the correlation coefficients being higher than 0.8. The results by the second method agreed best with those by the first method (standard but time- and hand-consuming) with slope of the regression line next to 1 and a very small intercept. The advantages of the methods studied were compared.