Immunoassay in Toxicology Diagnosis

Immunoassays are useful laboratory methods for clinical and forensic toxicology diagnostics. The methods are fast, sensitive, accurate and let determine poisons concentrations in different kinds of biological fluids. There are blood and urine or alternative: saliva, sweat and hair. The choice of the sample depends on the purpose of analysis. In acute poisoning the blood or serum poison concentration is important, but when the diagnosis is made more than 24 h post-ingestion, the urine sample should be collected and analyzed. The urine toxicology analysis let confirm the poison’s ingestion. Alternative samples are more and more common, but they are used usually in forensic toxicology, in medical toxicology the results of hair or sweat determination are useful in the history of drugs overdosing or abusing research. Toxicological diagnostics is consequence, enables to make distinction if observed patient’s symptoms are correlated to poisoning or other reasons. Fast quantitative measurement is important for poisoning confirmation, prognosis and decisions about specific treatment. All emergency rooms and poisoning treatment centers should have full access to such diagnostics. The most important immunoassay determinations are: the most often (e.g. alcohol, benzodiazepines, drugs of abuse) and the decision making ones (e.g. acetaminophen, phenobarbital, digoxin, amanitines).