Urine based drug testing has proved to be the simplest testing technique, offering benefits of being inexpensive and less intrusive than blood based testing methods. Urine drug testing or urinalysis has been quite popular and has been employed successfully for testing a diverse array of compounds across the globe because of the many advantages it offers: 1) It is one the most economical drug testing methods with least working cost. 2) This method is fairly accurate & is referred to as “the gold standard”. 3) It can be carried out easily at home or office. 4) It can detect drug use within last one or two weeks depending upon the type of drug tested for. The samples are often processed in the laboratory by several testing techniques viz. high performance liquid chromatography, gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) etc. The samples are processed by either of the technique or all of these methods to cross check the results.. In case of certain biomarkers, like hCG or CRP, various specific labelled antibodies can be used. However, this technique has several loopholes & disadvantages too: 1) This technique can be fooled simply by sample adulteration or substitution. 2) It is not possible to detect the immediate drug abuse i.e. if the drugs have been taken within 0-3 hours from taking the test; it is quite likely that the drugs have not been metabolized and would not show up in the urine! 3) This technique is often integrated with temperature tests to insure sample integrity as the sample is susceptible to degrade in the “lukewarm” urine! 4) It requires private rooms for sample collection.
Self Collection
