New Method Detects Drug Abuse In Exhaled Breath
Drug testing is most commonly performed using urine samples and its accuracy has made it the gold standard, but collecting samples is inconvenient so a group of researchers from the Department of Laboratory Medicine at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden have been working on developing an alternative to urine testing that focuses on exhaled breath.Professor Olof Beck, lead researcher of the study, and his team have developed the first fully validated and robust screening method for the routine measurement of drugs of abuse in exhaled breath. The procedure involves a simple method of sample collection and preparation, which is followed by a highly sensitive analytical technique known as LC-MS (Liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry). read more