Evaluation of potential breath biomarkers for active smoking: assessment of smoking habits

Acetylene in breath: background levels and real-time elimination kinetics after smoking

“…In that respect, acetylene cannot compete as a biomarker for smoking status with molecules like 2,5-dimethylfuran, which can be detected at elevated levels more than 24 h after the last cigarette [13]. An additional complication arises because acetylene is not a truly specific marker for tobacco smoke since exposure to other types of combustion products will also result in an elevated acetylene level.…”

Analytical challenges in breath analysis and its application to exposure monitoring

“…Levels of acetone, the main VOC detected in healthy people, vary significantly from one person to another, usually 200-800 ppbv (but up to 3500 ppbv in diabetics) [93,94]. This wide variation, together with the fact that other VOCs are usually present at significantly lower levels (2-3 orders of magnitude less than acetone) [20], may result in losses by competitive adsorption if accurate sampling conditions are not chosen.…”

“…The volume of breath sample that is usually collected currently ranges from a few mL when VOCs are directly retained into a sorbent device [23,[39][40][41][42]] to 1 L when breath is collected in a gas-sampling container [12,13,16,[20][21][22]25,27,29,[43][44][45][46].…”

“…These bags must be made of inert materials to avoid both diffusion and reactions between the compounds and the bag. The most commonly used material is Tedlar [10,20,[25][26][27]29,44,61,[70][71][72][73][74] but other materials such as Teflon [9,53,74,75], FlexFoil [74], and Nalophan [74] are also used.…”

“…Unfortunately, this limits the applicability of SPME when target compounds have to be detected at lower levels. For example, 2,5-dimethylfuran, a promising breath biomarker for determining smoking status or continuous exposure to environmental tobacco smoke, has to be detected at the low-pptv range in breath samples if it is to be found some hours after contact with tobacco smoke [20,29,86]. Analyses performed in our laboratory showed that SPME failed to detect this compound just a few minutes after smoking a cigarette, whereas the compound was detected for more than 24 h after smoking using a multi-bed sorbent capillary trap.…”