ASSESSMENT OF THE IMPACT OF CLEANING PROTOCOL AND PUFFING REGIMEN ON IQOS EMISSIONS

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