Quantification of Blood Alcohol Concentration Using Alcohol Oxidase Dipsticks

Alcohol detection dipsticks have been utilized as a qualitative test to detect the presence of alcohol in oral fluids. The present study was conducted in order to see whether alcohol oxidase dipsticks (Chematics) could be utilized as a quantitative tool to measure blood alcohol concentrations (BAC). Human saliva was utilized and spiked with ethanol standards to create a final solution with concentrations including 200, 100, 50 and 25 mg/dl of ethanol. Verification of these concentrations was done on a Shimadzu 14‐A Gas Chromatograph, equipped with a Supelco 5% Carbowax packed column. The dipsticks were exposed to the ethanol‐saliva solution and placed within a Biorad Gel Doc XR analyzer under fluorescent white light. The absorbance density of the reaction band was then measured using Biorad's Quantity One analysis software (Ver. 4.6.2) and a standard curve was plotted. A linear regression analysis was conducted between ethanol concentration and absorbance density. A significant correlation was found with an r squared value of 0.9917. These results indicate the potential use of alcohol oxidase dipsticks as a non‐invasive quantitative tool to measure blood alcohol levels.