Detection of Nicotine and Cotinine in Human Hair by High Performance Liquid Chromatography

Indianapolis, IN

Drug testing has become more prevalent in today's society; however, many common tests (e.g. urine, saliva, and others) are intrusive and/or prone to generating false results. Recently, human hair has been explored as an alternative method for drug screening because drugs persist for a longer time in hair and sample collection is less intrusive. In this work, high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) coupled with ultraviolet-visible detection has been successfully utilized to separate and detect nicotine and cotinine, chemicals commonly found in cigarette smoke. In addition to refining and optimizing the chromatographic separation, figures of merit for both analytes have been determined. This method was subsequently utilized to determine nicotine and cotinine levels in both spiked and natural human hair samples.