Open Access Research Article Amagai et al., Pharm Anal Acta 2015, 6:7 DOI: 10.4172/2153-2435.1000399 Volume 6 • Issue 7 • 1000399 Pharm Anal Acta ISSN: 2153-2435 PAA, an open access journal Abstract To measure nicotine personal exposure in our daily life, we have developed a determination method of personal exposure to nicotine. The method consisted of passive sampling of nicotine, simple solvent extraction and high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) determination. The passive sampler was badge type and collection media was sodium bisulfate impregnated quartz fber flter. The collected nicotine as nicotine bisulfate was extracted with pure water simply. Nicotine bisulfate was separated by HPLC, and detected with spectrophotometry. Three kinds of HPLC separation column were tested, and the best separation was attained with a cation exchange column, Zorbax 300-SCX. We have also evaluated the kinds of flter used, stability of nicotine bisulfate. Nicotine bisulfate on the flter was not evaporated or degraded in the outdoor air. The amount of collected nicotine was converted to air concentration by the equation that was made from simultaneous active- and passive- sampling experiments. Then it was suggested that nicotine determination method developed in this study was useful for estimate nicotine personal exposure accurately. Determination of Nicotine Exposure Using Passive Sampler and High Performance Liquid Chromatography Amagai T 1* , Bai H 1 , Wang Q 1 , Miyake Y 1 , Noguchi M 2 and Nakai S 3 1University of Shizuoka, Shizuoka, Japan 2 Seikei University, Musashino city, Tokyo, Japan 3 Yokohama National University, Yokohama, Japan Keywords: Nicotine; Personal exposure; Passive sampling; HPLC Introduction Passive smoking is one of the major public health problems in the world. Lung cancer is the cancer of the first place of cause-of- death ranking in Japan [1]. International agency for research on cancer classified not only tobacco smoking but also involuntary smoking into human carcinogen (Table 1) [2]. By Health Promotion Act in Japan, it was restricted to smoke tobacco at a public place in Japan. A similar law was made by developed countries. Exposure to ETS for non-smoker was important problems in the world [3]. To estimate health effect of ETS, it is necessary to measure personal exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) quantitatively. Nicotine is a well-known marker of ETS as well as particulate matter [4,5]. The standard method for determining vapor phase nicotine was published by international standard organization (ISO 18145) [6]. In this method, nicotine was collected actively by XAD-4 beads packed in the tube, extracted with ethyl acetate and analyzed by GC/NPD. Since this method used sampling pump, it was difficult to be used for personal exposure measurement. It was also reported that nicotine was evaporated or degraded during sampling when the sampling time was longer. Saito et al. reported that nicotine collection amount decrease during sampling when adsorbent such as XAD-4 was used for collection, and they used alkaline coating XAD-4 to prevent decreasing of nicotine during sampling [7]. Passive sampler is small, light, noiseless and cheap, then it is suitable for analyze personal exposure for air pollutants [8]. It was reported *Corresponding author: Amagai T, Department of Environmental Science and Health, University of Shizuoka, Shizuoka, Japan, Tel: + (81)-54-264-5798; E-mail: amagai@u-shizuoka-ken.ac.jp Received July 16, 2015; Accepted July 29, 2015; Published July 31, 2015 Citation: Amagai T, Bai H, Wang Q, Miyake Y, Noguchi M , et al. (2015) Determination of Nicotine Exposure Using Passive Sampler and High Performance Liquid Chromatography. Pharm Anal Acta 6: 399. doi:10.4172/21532435.1000399 Copyright: © 2015 Amagai T, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. that sodium bisulfate impregnated filter was useful for collecting nicotine [9]. Recently, MoNIC passive sampler was developed by Huynh et al., for determining personal exposure to nicotine [10,11]. In this method, nicotine was collected as sulfate in the sampler. Then the sample was neutralized by alkaline solution, and nicotine in the sample was extracted by organic solvent and determined by GC/MS. Nicotine was determined with reverse phase HPLC in several papers [12-14]. Ion pair HPLC was also used [15]. Then we found that nicotine salts could be determined with HPLC/spectrometry. We have developed an analytical method including extraction of nicotine sulfate by distilled water and analysis of the aqueous solutions by HPLC. Since we determined nicotine sulfate directly by HPLC / spectrophotometry in this system, the operations were simple. Materials and Methods Reagents Reagent grade nicotine was purchased from Wako Pure Chemical Industries Ltd., Osaka. HPLC grade methanol, reagent grade sodium bisulfate, ammonium formate, quinoline and trimethylamine were also bought from Wako. Distilled water for 0.5% ammonium formate solution was purified with Milli Q Direct Q-UV (Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany). \ Recovery ± SD Quartz fber flter (QR-100) 94% ± 11% Glass fber flter (GA55) 49% ± 27% Glass fber flter (GB100) 25% ± 15% SD: Standard Deviation Table 1: Recoveries of nicotine from different flters. P h a r m a c e u t i c a A n a l y t i c a A c t a ISSN: 2153-2435 Pharmaceutica Analytica Acta