Urinary metabolic profiling of volatile organic compounds in acute exposed volunteers after an oil spill in Republic of Korea

Abstract

The Herbei Spirit oil spill occurred in western Korea. A large number of people who participated in the cleanup tasks of the contaminated area were exposed to crude oil component. We developed a method to monitor volatile organic compound (VOC) metabolites in urine, and evaluate the acute exposure caused by the oil spill in exposed volunteer workers (n = 100, 20.7 +/- 2.1 years, mean +/- SD). Acidified urine samples were extracted by SPE, derivatized with trimethylsilyl, and analyzed using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. Calibration curves were found to be linear from 3 to 1000 ng/mL (r(2) > 0.993). Accuracy was over 82.4%, and precision was less than 24.8%. Using this method, the VOC metabolites, except hippuric acid, were present at higher levels in the urine samples of volunteers after cleanup work. The levels of mandelic acid (MA) and trans,trans-muconic acid (t,t-MU) were increased significantly (p < 0.001). The exposure effect was greater in women than in men. The effect of smoking was analyzed in all exposed and non-exposed groups, with non-smokers showing increased MA and t,t-MU levels related to exposure. The present method was reliable to determine VOC metabolites in urine and could be useful for biomonitoring of acute exposure effects of VOCs.

Highly sensitive electromembrane extraction for the determination of volatile organic compound metabolites in dried urine spot

“…A comparison of the developed method with other reported methods is shown in Table 6 [17,[35][36][37]. The data indicate that the proposed technique is efficient and sensitive for extraction of the model analytes.…”

Benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene: Current analytical techniques and approaches for biological monitoring

“…Conventional SPE methods have also been developed for determination of BTEX metabolites [60,86,92,101,103,[105][106][107]. The quaternary ammonium ion exchange resin (SAX-SPE) is the most frequently used procedure for the extraction of tt-MA from urine [60,92].…”

“…[97][98][99][100][101][102], HPLC with photodiode array detector (HPLC-PAD) [103,104], gas chromatography (GC) with mass spectrometry (GC-MS) [105][106][107][108][109][110][111], GC with flame ionization detector (GC-FID) [112,113] or electron-capture detector (GC-ECD) [113], liquid chromatography/hybrid quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry (LC-QqTOFMS) [114], and ion chromatography (IC) [115]. Some of these methods are develop specifically to measure only one of the BTEX metabolites [14,60,[81][82][83][84]86,88,[94][95][96][97][98][99]106,107], whereas others were developed to simultaneous determination of two or more metabolites of BTEX [85,89,90,105,[108][109][110][111]114]. Most of these analytical methods use liquid-liquid extraction (LLE)…”

“…Some of these methods are develop specifically to measure only one of the BTEX metabolites [14,60,[81][82][83][84]86,88,[94][95][96][97][98][99]106,107], whereas others were developed to simultaneous determination of two or more metabolites of BTEX [85,89,90,105,[108][109][110][111]114]. Most of these analytical methods use liquid-liquid extraction (LLE) [14,87,88,109,110,113] or conventional solid phase extraction (SPE) [86,92,103,105,106,112] for sample preparation. However, microextraction techniques (METs) such as hollow-fiber liquid-phase microextraction (LPME) [91,93], single drop liquid-liquid-liquid microextraction (LLLME) [81], partitioned dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction (PDLLME) [96], solid phase microextraction (SPME) [111] and microextraction by packed sorbet (MEPS) [82][83]…”

Oxidative stress biomarkers in long-term participants in clean-up work after the Hebei Spirit oil spill

“…Studies on potential health effects of Hebei Spirit oil spill were mostly on immediate or acute health effects which included physical and mental symptoms (Cheong et al, 2011;Ha et al, 2012;Lee et al, 2010;Sim et al, 2010). Acute symptoms such as eye symptoms, headaches, skin symptoms, neurovestibular symptoms and respiratory symptoms, persisted for more than 1 to 2 years after one large oil spill accident (Na et al, 2012).…”