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Insights into the Decontamination of Cocaine-Positive Hair Samples
A highly discussed step in hair sample preparation for forensic analytics is the applied decontamination. The here presented investigations aim to gain insight and give recommendations on how to conduct this decontamination for the analysis of cocaine consumption in hair. Key insights were gained fr...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Oxford University Press
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8363799/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33002114 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jat/bkaa143 |
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author | Erne, Robert Baumgartner, Markus R Kraemer, Thomas |
author_facet | Erne, Robert Baumgartner, Markus R Kraemer, Thomas |
author_sort | Erne, Robert |
collection | PubMed |
description | A highly discussed step in hair sample preparation for forensic analytics is the applied decontamination. The here presented investigations aim to gain insight and give recommendations on how to conduct this decontamination for the analysis of cocaine consumption in hair. Key insights were gained from the investigation of cocaine consumer hair, which was artificially contaminated in a humid atmosphere with (13)C(6) labelled cocaine and from cocaine powder contaminated hair. Several decontamination protocols were investigated, whereby the usage of a decontamination protocol consisting of multiple short repetitive washes allowed to visualize the wash out of ((13)C(6)-) cocaine. Multiple methanol washes proved to be an efficient and simple decontamination approach. Our findings showed that decontamination protocols can successfully wash out recent cocaine contaminations. They were observed to be rather quickly washed out, whereas cocaine from consumption or “older” cocaine contaminations were shown to eliminate both at a constant rate (from inner hair compartments). Thus, the usage of decontamination protocols to differentiate between consumption and contamination was shown to be limited. As contamination can happen any time at any level, only the application of elaborated decision trees, based on cocaine metabolite ratios and thresholds, can provide the distinction between consumption and contamination. Thus, the authors highly recommend the usage of such tools on all hair samples analyzed for cocaine consumption. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8363799 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | Oxford University Press |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-83637992021-08-17 Insights into the Decontamination of Cocaine-Positive Hair Samples Erne, Robert Baumgartner, Markus R Kraemer, Thomas J Anal Toxicol Article A highly discussed step in hair sample preparation for forensic analytics is the applied decontamination. The here presented investigations aim to gain insight and give recommendations on how to conduct this decontamination for the analysis of cocaine consumption in hair. Key insights were gained from the investigation of cocaine consumer hair, which was artificially contaminated in a humid atmosphere with (13)C(6) labelled cocaine and from cocaine powder contaminated hair. Several decontamination protocols were investigated, whereby the usage of a decontamination protocol consisting of multiple short repetitive washes allowed to visualize the wash out of ((13)C(6)-) cocaine. Multiple methanol washes proved to be an efficient and simple decontamination approach. Our findings showed that decontamination protocols can successfully wash out recent cocaine contaminations. They were observed to be rather quickly washed out, whereas cocaine from consumption or “older” cocaine contaminations were shown to eliminate both at a constant rate (from inner hair compartments). Thus, the usage of decontamination protocols to differentiate between consumption and contamination was shown to be limited. As contamination can happen any time at any level, only the application of elaborated decision trees, based on cocaine metabolite ratios and thresholds, can provide the distinction between consumption and contamination. Thus, the authors highly recommend the usage of such tools on all hair samples analyzed for cocaine consumption. Oxford University Press 2020-10-07 /pmc/articles/PMC8363799/ /pubmed/33002114 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jat/bkaa143 Text en © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) ), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com |
spellingShingle | Article Erne, Robert Baumgartner, Markus R Kraemer, Thomas Insights into the Decontamination of Cocaine-Positive Hair Samples |
title | Insights into the Decontamination of Cocaine-Positive Hair Samples |
title_full | Insights into the Decontamination of Cocaine-Positive Hair Samples |
title_fullStr | Insights into the Decontamination of Cocaine-Positive Hair Samples |
title_full_unstemmed | Insights into the Decontamination of Cocaine-Positive Hair Samples |
title_short | Insights into the Decontamination of Cocaine-Positive Hair Samples |
title_sort | insights into the decontamination of cocaine-positive hair samples |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8363799/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33002114 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jat/bkaa143 |
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