Urine| Hair Follicle | Oral Fluid | Blood | ETG
Hair assessments have gained recognition as a potent instrument for identifying drug and alcohol consumption. Hair captures a prolonged record of alcohol and other drugs by embedding biomarkers within the strands of growing hair. When collected near the scalp, hair offers a detection timeframe of up to around three months for alcohol and other substances. Hair is straightforward to collect, relatively challenging to tamper with, and easy to transport.
A sample of 1.5 inches consisting of about 200 hair strands (roughly the dimensions of a #2 pencil) nearest to the scalp yields 100mg of hair, the optimal sample for screening and corroboration. For EtG, additional tests, and/or tests surpassing ten panels, a 150mg specimen is advised. It's prudent to weigh the specimen on a jeweler’s scale. If scalp hair isn't viable, an equivalent amount of body hair might be gathered. When discussing head hair, we are only referring to scalp hair. Body hair encompasses all other hair types (facial, axillary, etc.).
Process Overview
The essential four stages in the laboratory processing of a drug test result include Accessioning, Screening, Extraction, and Confirmation.
Accessioning pertains to the initial handling of a sample within a laboratory's system. This comprises confirming that the sample was sealed and dispatched correctly, allocating a random LAN (Laboratory Accessioning Number), and completing any supplementary data inputs not provided by an electronic chain of custody system.
Screening denotes a preliminary brisk check for drugs of abuse. Though Screening is an economical method to exclude drug usage in most samples, a positive screen must be verified for court admissibility. Samples that are presumably positive in Screening necessitate a secondary confirmation.
If a sample is tentatively positive in the Screening phase, more hair is extracted from the initial specimen and prepped for Extraction. During this phase, drugs are extracted from hair at a substantially lower concentration than through other techniques (e.g., urine or oral fluid), making hair drug screening the most complex methodology to execute.
Verification of any positive screening outcome is executed via GC/MS, GC/MS/MS, or LC/MS/MS. All presumptive positive samples are cleansed before confirmation as deemed necessary. The entire laboratory procedure from Accessioning to Confirmation is scrutinized under both the CAP (College of American Pathologists) Hair classification and the accreditation to ISO / IEC 17025 standards.
Advantages of hair drug testing:
Limitations:
Note: Despite often being termed as "hair follicle tests", the test itself examines the hair strand and not the hair follicle beneath the scalp
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