title: Discriminating nicotine and non-nicotine containing e-liquids using infrared spectroscopy.
abstract: In a few countries, including Belgium, nicotine-containing e-cigarettes and e-liquids are considered medicines, and therefore cannot freely be sold, but should be distributed in a pharmacy. The fact that in the neighbouring countries these products are freely available, poses a problem for custom personnel, the more the nicotine content of the products is not always labelled, especially when they are bought through internet. Therefore there is a need for easy-to-use equipment and methods to perform a first on site screening of intercepted samples, both for border control as to check label compliance of the sample. The use of attenuated total reflectance-infrared spectroscopy (ATR-IR) and near infrared spectroscopy (NIR), combined with chemometrics was evaluated for the discrimination between nicotine containing and non-nicotine containing samples. It could be concluded that both ATR-IR and NIR could be used for the discrimination when combined with the appropriate chemometric techniques. The presented techniques do not need sample preparation and result in models with a minimum of false negative samples. If a large enough training set can be established the interpretation can be fully automated, making the presented approach suitable for on-site screening of e-liquid samples.
authors.affiliation: Division of food, medicines and consumer safety, Section Medicinal Products, Scientific Institute of Public Health (WIV-ISP), J. Wytmansstraat 14, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium. Electronic address: Eric.Deconinck@wiv-isp.be.
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Deconinck
authors.affiliation: Division of food, medicines and consumer safety, Section Medicinal Products, Scientific Institute of Public Health (WIV-ISP), J. Wytmansstraat 14, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium.
authors.forename: J L
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Bothy
authors.affiliation: Division of food, medicines and consumer safety, Section Medicinal Products, Scientific Institute of Public Health (WIV-ISP), J. Wytmansstraat 14, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium; Department of Toxicology, Dermato-Cosmetology and Pharmacognosy, Center for Pharmaceutical Research (CePhar), Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Laarbeeklaan 103, B-1090 Brussels, Belgium.
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Barhdadi
authors.affiliation: Division of food, medicines and consumer safety, Section Medicinal Products, Scientific Institute of Public Health (WIV-ISP), J. Wytmansstraat 14, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium.
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Courselle
mesh_terms: D001530:Belgium; D066300:Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems / Q000592:standards; D009538:Nicotine / Q000032:analysis*; D019265:Spectroscopy, Near-Infrared / Q000379:methods*
chemical_list: D009538:Nicotine
keywords: ATR-IR; Chemometrics; Mobile detection approaches; Nicotine; e-Cigarettes