Is There Any Nicotine In Your Blood?

UsaDrugTest — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 15:14:21 +0000

When you inhale nicotine, it enters your blood stream and your body metabolizes it into continine. Therefore, checking for continine is a way to determine if you are a smoker. Nicotine tests apply immunoassay technology to detect continine in blood, hair, urine, and saliva. All nicotine tests detect the presence of continine at a cut-off point of 200 ng/ml.

How accurate is this kind of test? A member of alt.smokers discussion group say the tests achieves 95 percent accuracy. The tests can measure the level of continine in the body for as long as two weeks.

How long does it take for nicotine to surface in urine tests? American Lung Cancer states that nicotine is gone from your blood and urine within 72 hours after your last cigarette. what you can still find in your urine though, is continine.

Nicotine tests are taken for a few reasons. The most obvious reason is for health insurance. Insurance companies conduct nicotine tests to classify smokers into three different premium classes. As a smoker, your premium will be higher than a non smoker. Studies show that smokers pay as high as three times the premium of non smokers. If you remain smoke free for five years, you get to enjoy the lowest premium.

Another reason would be for concerned parents who want to know whether their teenage child smokes or not. With nicotine tests, you can check your child’s tobacco consumption. If you have a family member who smokes in the home, you can examine the exposure of second hand smoke using this test.

American surveys reveal that more than 4 million children under 18 smoke cigarettes. Newspaper headlines expose teenagers smoking in schools. It is no surprise then that some high schools screen their students for cigarettes. School administrators believe that tobacco consumption can lead the students to drug abuse.

When you undergo a smoking cessation program, you can use a continine test kit to confirm your freedom from nicotine and the effectiveness of the program itself. You will also find it useful if one of your quitting methods involves nicotine cleansing products. You can know if it really removes nicotine from your body.

You can easily purchase nicotine test kits from pharmacies, drug stores, or over the internet. The more common brands include NicAlert, TobacAlert, and COT.

Some say that nicotine can leave your body within 24 hours. So, why do you need nicotine tests then? A study by Exam & Profile Services in Wisconsin indicates that continine will appear in urine for weeks after smoking. Unlike other conventional methods such as gas chromatography and HPLC-mass spectrometry, you can use nicotine test kits at home. They are also cheap and simple to apply.

Why is Hair Follicle Drug Testing Better?

UsaDrugTest — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 14:20:28 +0000

Hair follicle drug testing is a new alternative to urine testing which is more reliable is easier to conduct. Unlike urine drug testing where the collection of the sample requires privacy and thus promotes a multitude of evasion methods. Hair follicle drug testing is much more reliable since it goes back up to 90 days depending on the test and the type of test conducted.

The only sample required is hair of the subject which is analyzed to detect evidence of drug abuse. As usual with any abuse detection test in the market, there are products which are purportedly capable of cheating the hair follicle drug testing process and returning a clean result. The more prominent among these that are doing brisk business over the internet are the so called cleansing shampoos. They only succeed in cleaning the exterior of the hair and leave the inside with trace amounts of illegal drugs as evidence.

In contrast, there are masking agents available to cheat the urine drug tests that are in wide use right now. Just the fact that in most cases the urine samples are collected in privacy enables the subject to provide a falsified or tampered sample for the test. Hair follicle drug testing is better on this front because the person in charge of the test can personally collect a sample and ensure that there will be no tampering of the sample.

Conducting a hair follicle drug test is child’s play with all those do-it-yourself drug test kits available in the market today. All you have to do is order a test over the internet and once the kit arrives, just follow the instructions on it accurately. Hair follicle drug testing works on the principle that when a drug is injected (or otherwise infused) into the blood stream which nourishes the growing hair follicles, a marginal but traceable amount of the drug is left on the hair follicle. Even after the hair follicle grows out, a trace amount of the drug is still left there which could be detected in the laboratory.

A half inch of hair sample could resolve into a 30-day history of drug abuse after being subjected to hair follicle drug testing. If the sample as 1.5 inches long, the rule of thumb dictates that up to 90 days of drug abuse history can be ascertained. People who are contemplating shaving their heads to evade the test could use the fact that body hair could also be used to test for drugs. The result of the tests is not affected by the use of bleaches or shampoos of any kind. It would be comforting to know that second hand smoke of weed is not detected in hair follicle drug testing.

Hair follicle drug testing is precise and sophisticated process, the low point being that it is also a slow process. A proper hair follicle test could take as long as 3 months before the results are returned. This obstinate delay in the availability of the result puts many people off, but the accuracy of the results and the general reliability of the method is an advantage that surely overrides any drawbacks of this process.

The amusing fact is that no matter whether you chose to agree with the credibility of hair follicle drug testing or not, this testing methodology is gaining wide opinion and devout followers. The future would see the elimination of urine drug tests in favor of this test for sure. The odds weigh in favor of the hair follicle drug tests, and for obvious reasons.

usa drug test » Blood Stream

Is There Any Nicotine In Your Blood?

Why is Hair Follicle Drug Testing Better?