The 13th World Conference on Tobacco OR Health

Objective: This study describes a simple, less expensive and quantitative colorimetric urine test, for assessing smoking status of women subjects.

Methods: In a cross-sectional study, 809 women hospital employee's answered a questionnaire on smoking subject and provided a urine sample for nicotine metabolites analysis. This quantitative colorimetric urine test based on the könig reaction, in which pink-red chromophores formed from nicotine and its metabolites condensation with barbituric acid were extracted into acetate buffer. As the analytical condition, an aliquot of urine sample (0.5 ml) was mixed with 0.2 ml of 4 M acetate buffer (pH: 4.7), with 0.1 ml of KCN (1%), with 0.1 ml of chloramin T (1%) and then with 0.5 ml of barbituric acid (10%). The quantitative measurable time defined as the duration of 45 min and absorbance at 510 nm.

Results: A linear relationship was observed between cotinine concentrations up to 50 mg/l (r=0.9999, p<0.001,n=20) and the detection limit of the procedure were 0.203 mg/l wile limit of quantification were 0.615 mg/l. inter assay CV were 2.11 at 25 mg/l Cotinine. Sensitivity and specificity were 70.1% and 99.2 %, respectively for nicotine metabolites concentration among workers (n=385) when adopting 6.6 µM cotinine equivalent as a cut off value and the area under the ROC curve was 0.894. In a population of women smokers, urinary cotinine concentration increased significantly with number of cigarettes smoked Conclusions: The method described is straightforward, not labor intensive and can be applicable to quantitative detection of smoking.