A low-cost eco-friendly fast drug extraction (FaDEx) technique for environmental and bio-monitoring of psychoactive drug in urban water and sports-persons' urine samples.

Nicotine is the most prominent psychoactive/addictive chemical substance consumed worldwide among young players in team sports. Moreover, urinary nicotine discharge and nicotine-based products disposal in environmental waters has been unavoidable in recent years. Therefore, sensitive monitoring of nicotine content in environmental waters and human urine samples is essential. In this study, we developed a miniaturized novel green, low-cost, sensitive, in-syringe-based semi-automated fast drug extraction (FaDEx) protocol coupled with gas chromatography-flame ionization detection (GC-FID) for the efficient environmental and bio-monitoring of nicotine in aqueous samples. The FaDEx method consists of two steps; firstly, the target analyte was extracted using dimethyl carbonate (a green solvent) and extraction salts. After that, the extraction solvent was passed automatically through the solid-phase extraction cartridge at a constant flow rate for the cleanup process to achieve the sensitive nicotine analysis by GC-FID. Under optimized experimental conditions, the developed method showed excellent linearity over the concentration ranges between 20-2000 ng mL-1 with a correlation coefficient >0.99. The detection and quantification limits were 4 and 20 ng mL-1, respectively. The presented method was applied to monitor and assess nicotine exposure in sports-persons' urine and environmental water samples. The method accuracy and precision in terms of relative recovery and relative standard deviation (for triplicate analysis) were 85.4-110.2% and ≤8%, respectively. Finally, the impact of our procedure on the environment from a green analytical chemistry view was assessed using a novel metric system called AGREE, and obtained the greenness score of 0.87, indicating its an efficient alternative green analytical protocol for routine environmental and bio-monitoring of nicotine in environmental and biological samples.

The changes in shoulder rotation strength ratio for various shoulder positions and speeds in the scapular plane between baseball players and non-players.

[Purpose] This study aimed to investigate the effect of shoulder positions and speeds on internal and external rotation torque of college baseball players and age-matched non-players. [Subjects] Twenty first-level collegiate baseball players and 19 college students were recruited. [Methods] A dynamometer system was used to evaluate the shoulder rotation strength in sitting postures. Three testing positions, namely shoulder abduction of 45°, 70°, and 90° in the scapular plane, were combined with three testing speeds at 60°/s, 120°/s, and 210°/s. [Results] The maximum external and internal rotation torques both occurred at shoulder abduction of 70°. However, only external rotation torque was affected by the speed, with the peak value observed at 60°/s. The internal rotation torque of baseball players was larger than that of the control group under all testing conditions, but the external rotation did not show any difference. The ratio of external to internal rotation torque changed with the testing positions and speeds in both groups. The ratio in the control group was greater than that in the player group. [Conclusion] The shoulder position could affect the rotational strength, and the baseball players could strengthen their external rotators for better performance and injury prevention.