Authors: Catherine Tomicic Michèle Berode
Publish Date: 2010/02/13
Volume: 396, Issue: 7, Pages: 2709-2714
Abstract
Glycol ethers still continue to be a workplace hazard due to their important use on an industrial scale Currently chronic occupational exposures to low levels of xenobiotics become increasingly relevant Thus sensitive analytical methods for detecting biomarkers of exposure are of interest in the field of occupational exposure assessment 1Methoxy2propanol 1M2P is one of the dominant glycol ethers and the unmetabolized urinary fraction has been identified to be a good biological indicator of exposure An existing analytical method including a solidphase extraction and derivatization before GC/FID analysis is available but presents some disadvantages We present here an alternative method for the determination of urinary 1M2P based on the headspace gas chromatography technique We determined the 1M2P values by the direct headspace method for 47 samples that had previously been assayed by the solidphase extraction and derivatization gas chromatography procedure An intermethod comparison based on a Bland–Altman analysis showed that both techniques can be used interchangeably The alternative method showed a tenfold lower limit of detection 01 mg/L as well as good accuracy and precision which were determined by several urinary 1M2P analyses carried out on a series of urine samples obtained from a human volunteer study The within and betweenrun precisions were generally about 10 which corresponds to the usual injection variability We observed that the differences between the results obtained with both methods are not clinically relevant in comparison to the current biological exposure index of urinary 1M2P Accordingly the headspace gas chromatography technique turned out to be a more sensitive accurate and simple method for the determination of urinary 1M2PThe present work was supported by grants from the French Agency of Environmental and Occupational Health Safety Afsset the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health FOPH and the National Research Fund FNR in Luxembourg We also want to express our thanks to Ms C Arnoux for her skillful technical assistance
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