A rapid, low cost and precise method was developed for the determination of cadmium in whole blood using hydride generation atomic fluorescence (HG-AFS). Sample was simply prepared utilizing ultrasound-assisted leaching and the resulting solution was directly used for cadmium determination by HG-AFS. Adopting optimized conditions, the limit of detection (LOD) and limit of quantification (LOQ) of the proposed procedure were 0.08 and 0.26 µg L−1, calculated from three and ten times the standard deviations of eleven runs of blank blood sample (bovine blood) with low Cd content (0.2 µg L−1 Cd, tenfold diluted); and the relative standard deviation (RSD, n = 7) varied between 3-10% (between-run) at 1-8 µg L−1 cadmium level in blood. The accuracy and practical applicability of the method were validated by analyzing certified reference materials (CRMs) and further demonstrated by results comparison with inductively coupled plasma masss spectrometry (ICP-MS). Good agreement has been demonstrated between results obtained by HG-AFS and ICP-MS for cadmium determination in CRMS and human whole blood.
blood cadmium; ultrasound-assisted extraction; hydride generation; atomic fluorescence spectrometer
