Identification of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in five different cigarettes

Abstract

Cigarette smoking is one of the most damaging health hazard for human beings due to PAH emissions for the active and passive smokers and some other constituents of tobacco and cigarette smoke. In this study PAH contact of two Turkish and three foreign cigarettes are determined for tobacco and cigarette under different forms of smoking. Four kinds of smoking programmes are applied to each cigarette, namely direct smoking and smoking two, four and five cigarettes using a cigarette holder. For PAH analysis tobacco, collected cigarette butts and cigarette holders were extracted using toluene-methanol mixture (3:1 v/v) until exhaustion. The yield of tars are determined. The extracted tars were fractionated into aliphatic, neutral aromatic and polar fractions using column chromatography. The aromatic fractions were subjected to capillary column gas chromatography with FID detector on a 25 m*0.22 mm i.d. capillary column. The compounds were identified using Lee Retention Indices and internal standard of benzene, naphthalene, phenantrene, chrycene and piecene. The compounds identified in the aromatic fraction from tobacco and smoked cigarettes show distinctive differences. This is believed to be the consumption of original PAH compounds during combustion and pyrosynthesis of some new compounds during smoking