Abstract
Ethanol (ethylic alcohol) represents the most commonly used drug worldwide and is often involved in clinical and forensic toxicology. Based on several reports, excessive alcohol consumption is the main contributing factor in traffic accidents, drownings, suicides, and other crimes. For these reasons, it becomes essential to analyze the alcohol concentration during autopsy. Although blood is usually used for alcohol analysis in post-mortem cases, it could suffer alterations, putrefaction, and microbial contaminations. As an alternative to whole blood, vitreous humor has been successfully used in medico-legal studies. In this work, post-mortem specimens were analyzed for ethanol determination. The analysis of blood and vitreous humor were carried-out using gas chromatography-flame ionized detector (GC-FID) with a total run time of 6 min. The method was validated in terms of limit of detection, limit of quantification, dynamic range, sensibility, recovery, precision and trueness. A linear regression analysis indicated a coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.9981. The study confirmed no statistically differences between alcohol concentration in blood and vitreous humor, leading vitreous humor as an excellent matrix that could be used as an alternative to whole blood in toxicological analysis in cases where blood is not available.
Highlights
Ethanol represents the most commonly used drug worldwide and often involved in clinical and forensic toxicology [1]
Trueness was checked at three different concentrations, 0.01 g/L, 0.25 g/L and 2 g/L and deviations were within the 20% for the first value (LOQ) and within the 15% for the other 2 values
The results show that in 23 of 31 analyzed specimens (74%) ethanol concentration in vitreous humor was slightly higher than in blood, according to the previous study
Summary
Ethanol (ethylic alcohol) represents the most commonly used drug worldwide and often involved in clinical and forensic toxicology [1]. In 2018, morepeople than 3died million died a resultuse of the harmfulinuse of alcohol report that excessive alcohol consumption is the main contributing factor in causing traffic accidents, Several studies report that excessive alcohol consumption is the main contributing factor in causing drownings, suicides and othersuicides crimes. For these it becomes essentialitto analyzeessential the alcohol traffic accidents, drownings, other reasons, crimes. For these reasons, becomes to concentration in post-mortem specimens. An estimated million men and 46 million analyze the alcohol concentration in post-mortem specimens. An estimated 237 million men women suffer women from alcohol-use with the highest menamong and women in and 46 million suffer fromdisorders alcohol-use disorders withprevalence the highest among prevalence men and Europe
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
