Keywords
Ethanol, Postmortem Brain, Solvent Extraction, Gas Chromatography
Abstract
Distillation of brain tissue is a commonly used technique in the determination of brain ethanol concentrations. However, distillation suffers the disadvantages of being both time consuming and cumbersome in the forensic laboratory. In this study, we present a new, rapid method for the determination of ethanol content in brain tissue samples. This method employs solvent extraction with n-butanol and subsequent gas chromatographic analysis using n-propanol as an internal standard. The sensitivity of this technique was found to be similar to that obtained by distillation. The solvent extraction method presented has the advantages of rapidity of assay and ease of quantitation.
Recommended Citation
Moore, Steven J.; Porter, Ann C.; Ezell, Anna E.; Hume, Arthur S.; and Ho, I. K.
(1993)
"The Rapid Determination of Ethanol in Postmortem Brain Samples by Solvent Extraction and Gas Chromatography,"
Journal of Food and Drug Analysis: Vol. 1
:
Iss.
3
, Article 2.
Available at: https://doi.org/10.38212/2224-6614.3059
