Urine| Hair Follicle | Oral Fluid | Blood | ETG
Recognized as a robust mechanism, hair testing effectively identifies drug and alcohol use. Hair captures a prolonged timeline of substance indicators within the strands as they grow. Collected near the scalp, hair provides a detection window spanning up to three months for various substances. The collection process is straightforward, altering is somewhat challenging, and shipping is uncomplicated.
A 1.5-inch segment containing roughly 200 hair strands, akin to a #2 pencil's circumference, offers a suitable 100mg sample for analysis. For testing such as EtG, additional panels beyond ten, 150mg is preferable. It's advised to weigh the sample on a jeweler’s scale. In the absence of scalp hair, a comparable quantity of body hair is acceptable. References to head hair denote only scalp hair, while body hair encompasses all other forms (facial, axillary, etc.).
Process Overview
The laboratory drug test result process involves four critical stages: Accessioning, Screening, Extraction, and Confirmation.
Accessioning pertains to the specimen's initial integration into the lab's system. This encompasses validating the specimen's proper sealing and shipping, generating a unique LAN (Laboratory Accessioning Number), and completing any additional data entry if not facilitated by an electronic chain of custody.
Screening performs an expedited assessment for substance abuse. Although cost-efficient for negating drug consumption in majority of specimens, positive screenings require confirmation for legal admissibility. All presumptive positive samples in Screening necessitate further verification.
Should Screening yield a presumptive positive, additional hair from the sample undergoes preparation for Extraction. This phase extracts drugs from hair at much lower concentrations than alternative methods (e.g., urine, oral fluid), making hair drug testing a complex process.
GC/MS, GC/MS/MS, or LC/MS/MS methods confirm any positive screening outcomes. Presumptive positive samples are cleansed prior to necessary confirmations. The complete lab process from Accessioning to Confirmation is appraised under both the CAP (College of American Pathologists) Hair designation and ISO / IEC 17025 accreditation standards.
Advantages of hair drug testing:
Limitations:
Note: Commonly called "hair follicle tests", the procedure analyzes the hair strand itself, not the scalp follicle.
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