2023 · Journal of exposure science & environmental epidemiology · open access
A state-of-the-science review and guide for measuring environmental exposure biomarkers in dried blood spots
Jacobson et al.
The finding, in our words
High-performing dried blood spot assays have been developed and validated for measuring environmental exposures to tobacco smoke, trace elements, and several endocrine-disrupting chemicals, confirming the method as a viable minimally invasive alternative to venous sampling for field-based public health screening and paediatric epidemiological studies. Further validation is required for cadmium, arsenic, inorganic mercury, and bisphenol A to expand the panel of reliable decentralised exposure biomarkers.
A paraphrase to the Library’s standard, never the abstract. The source is one link away and is always the authority.
This review establishes that microsampling across blood, saliva, urine and stool matrices offers validated workflows and regulatory recognition for human biomonitoring comparable to conventional methods. It finds that these decentralised approaches enhance participant acceptability and enable screening in remote or low-resource settings.
This review of 2022 to 2023 work surveys dried blood microsampling for targeted and untargeted metabolomic and lipidomic profiling, finding the approach viable across paediatric research, therapeutic drug monitoring, metabolite screening, biomarker discovery, sports supervision, clinical disorder studies and forensic toxicology. The authors note that dried blood spots and VAMS dominate the published literature over other volumetric formats, and argue that harmonising analytical methods would accelerate wider clinical adoption of microsampling as an alternative to conventional plasma or serum profiling.
Isoelectric focusing from dried blood spot and capillary samples yields results identical to serum for transferrin glycosylation, with stable storage at -20 degrees Celsius for more than six months, enabling reliable diagnosis and therapy control of congenital disorders of glycosylation and supporting home self-collection for follow-up.
The analysis indicates that dried blood spots and volumetric absorptive microsampling enable minimally invasive monitoring of prohibited substances, with volumetric absorptive microsampling offering improved quantitative reliability over traditional dried spots.
Volumetric absorptive microsampling showed better precision than dried blood spots and a metabolic profile closer to whole blood, with stable signalling lipids for 24 hours at room temperature but significant changes after one week unless stabilised, indicating feasibility for decentralised sampling with the need for storage strategies.