Department of Chemistry, University of Waterloo, Ontario, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, Canada.
Anal Bioanal Chem. 2022 Jul;414(18):5573-5583. doi: 10.1007/s00216-022-03997-6. Epub 2022 Mar 10.
Exposure to household air pollutants is becoming a serious environmental health risk. Various methods can be applied to assess humans' exposure status to indoor pollutants, with breath monitoring being among the best options. Breath sampling is fast and non-invasive, and contains compounds that can be used as markers for evaluating exposure length and estimating internal concentrations of pollutants. However, the distribution of compounds between gas and droplets in breath samples represents one of the key challenges associated with this analytical method. In this work, a needle-trap device (NTD) was prepared by packing the needle with a porous filter, divinyl benzene, and Carboxen to enable the exhaustive capture of both droplet-bound and gaseous components. Furthermore, fiber-based solid-phase microextraction (SPME) was also applied to extract compounds from only the gas phase to distinguish this portion of analytes from the total concentration in the sample. Dynamic, real-time breath sampling was enabled via a new sampling tube equipped with 2 one-way valves, which was specially designed for this work. Both methods provided satisfactory reproducibility, repeatability, and sensitivity, with detection limits as low as 0.05 ng mL. To investigate the real-world applicability of the proposed devices, breath samples were obtained from volunteers who had been exposed to candle and incense smoke and aerosol sprays, or had smoked cannabis. The results revealed the high concentration of organic air pollutants in inhaled air (maximum of 215 ng mL) and exhaled breath (maximum of 14.4 ng mL) and a correlation between the components in inhaled air and exhaled breath. Significantly, the findings further revealed that the developed NTD has enhanced breath-sample determinations, especially for polar compounds, which tend to remain trapped in breath droplets.
暴露于家庭空气污染物正成为一个严重的环境健康风险。有各种方法可用于评估人类对室内污染物的暴露状况，其中呼吸监测是最佳选择之一。呼吸采样快速且无创，并且包含可作为评估暴露时间和估计污染物内部浓度的标志物的化合物。然而，呼吸样本中化合物在气体和液滴之间的分布是与该分析方法相关的关键挑战之一。在这项工作中，通过用多孔过滤器、二乙烯基苯和 Carboxen 填充针头制备了一个针阱装置 (NTD)，以实现对结合在液滴上的和气态的成分的完全捕获。此外，还应用纤维基固相微萃取 (SPME) 仅从气相中提取化合物，以将这部分分析物与样品中的总浓度区分开来。通过专门为此工作设计的带有 2 个单向阀的新型采样管，实现了动态、实时呼吸采样。这两种方法都提供了令人满意的重现性、重复性和灵敏度，检测限低至 0.05 ng mL。为了研究所提出的设备在现实世界中的适用性，从暴露于蜡烛和香薰烟雾以及气溶胶喷雾或吸食大麻的志愿者中获得了呼吸样本。结果显示，吸入空气中的有机空气污染物浓度很高（最高为 215 ng mL），呼出空气中的浓度也很高（最高为 14.4 ng mL），并且吸入空气中的成分与呼出空气中的成分之间存在相关性。重要的是，研究结果进一步表明，开发的 NTD 增强了呼吸样本的测定，特别是对于极性化合物，这些化合物往往会被困在呼吸液滴中。
