Evaluation of CO exposure in active smokers while smoking using breath analysis technique

The current study evaluated the personal CO exposure of active smokers while smoking under controlled conditions, decay rate of CO in the body following active smoking, and CO accumulation in the body from repeated active smoking using a novel device for the direct measurement of alveolar breath CO. Prior to this evaluation, the proposed alveolar CO measurement device was successfully evaluated as regards the effect of humidity, CO recovery, carryover effect, and in comparison with the bag sampling method. The breath concentrations prior to and after a single cigarette were measured using a repeated measure design. Under the controlled conditions employed in the present study, active smoking was found to cause a significant body burden of CO. The post-exposure breath CO level was 1.6–2.0 times higher than the background breath level, depending on the subject and cigarette brand. In addition, the pre- and post-exposure breath concentrations were both significantly different among the subjects, yet the ratios of post-exposure to pre-exposure breath concentrations did not differ significantly between the different cigarette brands. The time-series alveolar breath concentrations measured following active smoking showed that the post-exposure alveolar CO concentrations decreased slowly even in the early phase of the decay curves, indicating a mono-compartment uptake and elimination model for the human body. The half-lives estimated in the present study (301, 315, and 385 min) were longer than or comparable to those in previous studies. The breath measurements prior to and after repeated active smoking exhibited a significant increasing trend for both the pre- and post-exposure concentrations. The changes in the pre- and post-exposure breath CO concentrations with repeated smoking ranged from 7% to 23% and from 10% to 15%, respectively, with half-hour intervals between cigarettes, and from 4% to 11% and from 6% to 8%, respectively, with hour intervals between cigarettes. Accordingly, most of the current results indicated that CO was accumulated in the human body with repeated active smoking.