%0 Journal Article
%T Liquid Chromatography-Tandem Mass Spectrometry Assay to Detect Ethyl Glucuronide in Human Fingernail: Comparison to Hair and Gender Differences
%A Joseph Jones
%A Mary Jones
%A Charles Plate
%A Douglas Lewis
%A Michael Fendrich
%A Lisa Berger
%A Daniel Fuhrmann
%J American Journal of Analytical Chemistry
%P 83-91
%@ 2156-8278
%D 2012
%I Scientific Research Publishing
%R 10.4236/ajac.2012.31012
%X Over the past decade, the use of hair specimens for the long-term detection of the alcohol biomarker ethyl glucuronide has been increasing in popularity and usage. We evaluated the usefulness of fingernail clippings as a suitable alterna-tive to hair for ethyl glucuronide detection. A liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry method for the detection of ethyl glucuronide in fingernail clippings was fully validated and used to analyze the hair and/or fingernail specimens of 606 college-aged study participants. The limit of detection was 2 pg/mg, the limit of quantitation was 8 pg/mg and the method was linear from 8 to 2000 pg/mg. Intra- and inter-assay imprecision studies at three different concentrations (20, 40, 200 pg/mg) were all within 7.8% and all intra- and inter-assay bias studies at these levels were within 115.1% of target concentration. Ethyl glucuronide levels in fingernail (mean = 29.1 ¡À 55.6 pg/mg) were higher than ethyl glucuronide levels in hair (mean = 9.48 ¡À 22.3 pg/mg) and a correlation of the matched pairs was observed (r = 0.552, P < 0.01, n = 529). Evaluating each gender separately revealed that the correlation of male fingernail to male hair was large and significant (r = 0.782, P < 0.01, n = 195) while female hair to female fingernail was small yet sig-nificant (r = 0.249, P < 0.01, n = 334). The study results demonstrated that fingernail may be a suitable alternative to hair for ethyl glucuronide detection and may be the preferred sample type due to the lack of a gender bias.
%K Alcohol
%K Biomarkers
%K Liquid Chromatography-Tandem mass Spectrometry
%K LC-MS/MS
%K Ethyl Glucuronide
%K Fingernail
%K Hair
%U http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=16809