Assemble and validation of a simulated device of human exhaled breath aerosols for screening of illicit drug abuse by HPLC-TQ-MS/MS detection

Collecting exhaled breath aerosols (EBA) as a sample has a great potential to monitoring illicit drug abuse due to advantages of simple, non-invasiveness and unrestricted sampling. However, scarcity of positive samples has cramped development of more efficient techniques for monitoring illicit drug abuse in EBA. In this work, a simulated human exhaled breath aerosol (SHEBA) generating device based on Venturi jet principle was constructed by integrating nebulizing unit and collection unit to prepare positive EBAs. By means of ultra high-performance hyphenated with triple quadrupole tandem mass spectrometry (HPLC-TQ-MS/MS), using caffeine as a target drug, the device parameters were investigated by studying the effects of flow rates of nebulizing and auxiliary gases, drug concentration and etc., the performance was further validated by commonly abused drugs such as amphetamines (AMP, MAMP, MDA and MDMA). Electret material as adsorbent was used to collect SHEBAs generated by the device, achieving HPLC-TQ-MS/MS detection of the captured drugs at 40.0–2000.0 pg/filter. By this way, caffeine content in EBAs from six volunteers was successfully detected in the range of 51.6 ± 6.8–708 ± 51 pg/filter after drinking the caffeinated beverage. These validation experiments proved that SHEBA generating device could not only meet to the requirement of EBA analysis for illicit drug abuse at trace levels, but also provide the correction factors to calibrate the lower detection value caused by incomplete material adsorption.