Authors: Mahasen Al Qallaf.
In recent years, analysis of hair matrix has gained increasing importance in the determination of substances of abuse in many forensic fields. Hair analysis for drugs abuse can be expand the toxicological examination of conventional materials and thus contribute with additional important information to the complex evaluation of a certain case. Hair is a unique material for the retrospective investigation of chronic drug consumption, intentional or unintentional chronic drug toxicity in criminal cases. When compared with other biological samples, hair provides a large window for drug detection. Drugs get deposited in hair through blood circulation by various mechanisms, after its administration. The drug in hair is much stable and can be detected after a longer period of time as compared with other biological samples, such as urine, blood, and others. The main advantage of analyzing hair is its capacity to provide information over a long period of time before the sample was obtained, and also the fact that it accumulates the main drug and its metabolites. The present study discusses the analysis of drugs abuse in hair sample for the postmortem case, although the technique is common in many countries but it considers as new technique in Kuwait, and the forensic toxicology laboratory is just added this kind of analysis in Lab protocol, since the hair samples give a great and clean results of drugs and narcotics. Also, in this study different extraction procedures used to perform forensic toxicological analysis in hair as well as a sample preparation. The hair results of the postmortem case were supported by additional analysis of biological samples of both urine and blood that gives information of drugs have been taken. Immunoassay and high-performance liquid chromatography is an effective means for identifying drugs in various samples analyzed to give full survey in the present study case. As a result, hair analysis become part of forensic laboratory procedures, mostly due to better extraction methods allowing current instrumental analysis to detect lower amounts of certain drugs in hair, especially in the absence of other samples suitable for analysis.
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