Studies Of Heavy Metal Analytical Methods For Human Urine Using Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectroscopy

PP-31-154 Background/Aims: There are growing needs for the human biomonitoring to provide unique exposure informations to help prevent diseases that result from exposure to environmental chemicals. The purposes of human biomonitoring are to determine which chemicals get into people and at what concentrations, to establish reference ranges of exposed chemicals, to track, over time, trends in levels of exposure of the population, and to set priorities for researcher on human health effects. Among them, the quantification of trace metals in body fluids plays a major role in the diagnosis and treatment of a range of disorder. For the last 30 years, these determinations have been dominated by graphite-furnace atomic absorption spectroscopy techniques, which are single-element sequential analysis techniques and, hence are slow. Therefore, the introduction and development of inductively coupled plasma-mass spectroscopy (ICP-MS) are needed in clinical laboratories for multielement determinations. The ICP-MS methods with reduced sample consumption and simplified sample preparation make possible to access to a wider range of analytes at trace levels. Methods: This study was performed to develop the analytical methods using ICP-MS with HNO3-dilution pretreatment for toxic trace metals in human urine such as antimony, barium, beryllium, cadmium, cesium, cobalt, lead, molybdenum, platinum, tungsten, thallium, and uranium. The method detection limits, accuracies and precisions of each analytes were determined and the validations were carried out by analyzing CRMs such as NIST SRM and quality control materials such as SERO urine, ClinkChek, and BioRAD. Results: The ICP-MS methods were also validated by comparing the analytical results with those of graphite-furnace atomic absorption spectroscopy for cadmium in human urine samples (n = 75). The analytical results from 2 methods were in good agreement (P > 0.05) and showed good correlations (R = 0.932 for Cd in urine). Conclusion: This implied that the ICP-MS methods can be used as an alternative for a commonly used method such as graphite-furnace atomic absorption spectroscopy. Therefore, it is considered that the established ICP-MS methods showed good accuracies and precisions with high detection powers, which can be possibly used in biomonitoring project in near future.