Urine| Hair Follicle | Oral Fluid | Blood | ETG
Hair sampling has become recognized as an effective mechanism for detecting drug and alcohol consumption. Hair offers a longitudinal record of alcohol and drug use by capturing biomarkers within the strands of hair as they grow. When collected near the scalp, hair can present an approximately three-month window for detecting alcohol and drugs. Hair is straightforward to collect, relatively hard to tamper with, and easy to transport.
A 1.5-inch segment consisting of roughly 200 hairs (comparable to the thickness of a #2 pencil) closest to the scalp provides 100mg of hair, the optimal sample for screening and verification. For EtG, additional testing, and/or analyses exceeding 10 panels, a 150mg specimen is advised. It is suggested to weigh the specimen using a jeweler’s scale. If scalp hair is not available, a similar amount of body hair can be harvested. Reference to head hair indicates scalp hair only, whereas body hair includes all other hair types (facial, axillary, etc.).
Process Overview
The core stages in processing a lab drug test result encompass Accessioning, Screening, Extraction, and Confirmation.
Accessioning deals with the preliminary processing of a sample into a laboratory's database. This action verifies that the sample was sealed and dispatched correctly, assigns it a random LAN (Laboratory Accessioning Number), and completes any supplementary data entry not present in an electronic chain of custody system.
Screening employs an initial rapid assessment for drugs of abuse. While Screening is economically efficient for ruling out drug use in most samples, a positive screening requires validation to be court-admissible. Samples that are presumptively positive in Screening necessitate secondary confirmation.
If a sample shows a presumptive positive in the Screening stage, more hair is extracted from the original specimen for the Extraction phase. Here, drugs are extracted from hair at a significantly reduced concentration compared to different methods (e.g., urine or oral fluid), making hair drug screening the most challenging technique to execute.
Confirmation of any positive screening outcome is performed using GC/MS, GC/MS/MS, or LC/MS/MS. All samples yielding presumptive positives are cleansed prior to confirmation as necessary. The entire lab process from Accessioning to Confirmation is assessed under both the CAP (College of American Pathologists) Hair certification and the ISO / IEC 17025 standards accreditation.
Advantages of hair drug testing:
Limitations:
Note: Although often called "hair follicle tests," the analysis targets the hair strand and not the follicle beneath the scalp.
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