[Saliva cotinine determination using high-performance liquid chromatography with diode - array detection].

The use of tobacco is a very serious threat to public health. Reducing the proportion of smokers easily leads to improved health of the general population. Smoking is a proven risk factor for respiratory disease, cardiovascular disease and cancer and complications during pregnancy. To verify the level of exposure to tobacco smoke in most patients used a simple test markers of exposure. The most commonly used marker in the evaluation of exposure to tobacco products is cotinine, which is a major metabolite of nicotine contained in tobacco smoke. Biological material most commonly used in this type of study is blood, urine and saliva. In the present study Sarstedt Salivette tubes were used to samples collection. In order to determine the concentration of cotinine in saliva samples analyzed with high performance liquid chromatography with diode array detection after extraction of cotinine from saliva by solid phase extraction. The method was linear of 10 to 400 ng/ml. The limit of detection was the value of the signal-to-noise ratio S/N=3, it amounted to 6 ng/ml, the limit of quantification was 10 ng/ml. The intraday repeatability was 8% for lowconcentrations, for high concentrations - 3.7%. Reproducibility interdays for low concentrations was 2.4%, for high concentrations - 4.1%. We analyzed 18 samples of saliva derived from patients smoking volunteers from the Department of Conservative Dentistry and Periodontology, University of Medical Sciences. University of Medical Sciences and the Chair and Department of Endocrinology, Metabolism and Internal Medicine, University of Medical Sciences. University of Medical Sciences. Mean concentrations of cotinine in patients was 240.9 ng/ml of saliva. In this study we demonstrated the usefulness of the saliva cotinine determination method in the assessment of patient exposure to tobacco smoke.