Abstract:
A wide variety of tobacco products are currently available in the market. Although they
all imbibe the central function of delivering nicotine, they differ in design and mode of
operation. These variations could lead to the production of different suites of compounds,
and hence different toxicant profiles. To account for any product-specific toxicants, and
to comprehensively characterize the emissions of tobacco products, researchers have used
non-targeted analysis (NTA) besides targeted analysis methods of predetermined
compounds. In chapter two of this thesis, we describe recent NTA studies of tobacco
product emissions, highlighting the potential and challenges of NTA in tobacco research.
Although the challenges of NTA are multi-layered, cutting across sample generation and
collection, to instrumental setup and then data analysis, the chapter emphasizes its
potential in the identification of product-specific compounds. In the third chapter we
engaged NTA to assess the impact of users’ behavior on IQOS emissions using gas
chromatography tandem mass spectrometry. The effect of user behavior on toxicant
emissions was investigated in two ways: the effect of device cleanliness between
consecutive use sessions and the effect of puffing parameters that may alter the heating
temperature. The assessment was done under two sampling procedures, one involving
NTA analysis of filters derivatized by silylation, and the other using multi-step trapping
of IQOS aerosol followed by GC-MS analysis of particle and gas phases of the aerosol.
Both analyses led to the detection and semi-quantification of compounds belonging to
chemical classes such as alkanes, carboxylic acids, ketones, aromatic acids, esters, and
substituted hydrocarbons. Statistical analysis of the effect puffing parameters on IQOS
emissions showed that all the three puffing parameters (puff duration, number of puffs,
and puffing flow rate) had significant effects on IQOS emissions. However, device
cleaning did not have any statistically significant effect on IQOS emissions