Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons
(PAHs) are considered xenobiotics
of a potentially carcinogenic nature, being accumulated in the fatty
tissue of the body. The objective of this work was the development
and validation of a new analytical method to check the bioaccumulation
of these toxic compounds in human organs obtained from autopsies.
The contaminants were first isolated from the tissues by salt-assisted
liquid–liquid extraction in acetonitrile. Because of the low
concentrations of these compounds in the human body, a dispersive
liquid–liquid microextraction procedure was included. The preconcentrated
samples were analyzed by gas chromatography–mass spectrometry
to identify the compounds. Principal component analysis was applied
to show the natural clustering of forensic samples and orthogonal
partial least-squares discriminant analysis to develop a multivariate
regression method, which permitted the classification of samples.
The quantification limits for the 13 PAHs (acenaphthylene, fluorene,
phenanthrene, anthracene, pyrene, benzo(a)anthracene, chrysene, benzo(b)fluoranthene,
benzo(k)fluoranthene, benzo(a)pyrene, dibenz(a,h)anthracene, benzo(g,h,i)perylene,
and indeno(1,2,3-cd)pyrene) analyzed were in the 0.06–0.44
ng g–1 range, depending on the compound, while the
mean intraday relative standard deviation of about 7% demonstrated
the high precision of the method. Linearity was verified in the 0.5–200
ng g–1 range, and the enrichment factors were between
55 and 122. The results provided by the analysis of seven different
human organs (brain, liver, kidney, lung, heart, spleen, and abdominal
fat) from eight autopsies confirmed the PAH-bioaccumulation capacity
of human body, fat showing the highest degree of bioaccumulation.
The present work is the first study on PAH contamination in different
organs obtained from autopsies, being PAH detected in most human samples
at values ranged from 0 to 19 ng g–1.
