The Effectiveness of the Alere iScreen© Urine Adulteration Test Strip at Detecting Six Common Urine Adulterants

Abstract

In 1988, the United States government published the first federal regulations for the testing of human samples for the presence of illegal drugs. These regulations produced successful techniques for detecting illegal substances in human samples, specifically urine. However, they also caused an increase in methods used to falsify the results of these tests. The most common of these methods is that of in vitro adulteration, or adding a substance to a urine sample in order to cause a false negative test result. As a result of these adulteration methods, new tests have been developed to assess the integrity of samples collected for drug of abuse testing. To examine the effectiveness of one specimen validity test, the Alere iScreen© Urine Adulteration Test Strip, different concentrations of six common adulterants were created and combined with drug-positive human urine controls to simulate adulterated samples. Solid meat tenderizer, liquid meat tenderizer, lemon juice, apple cider vinegar, eye drops, and bleach were added at varying dilutions to Alere’s positive iScreen© Urine Control. Each sample was tested for pH, specific gravity, nitrite, glutaraldehyde, creatinine, and pyridinium chlorochromate/oxidant presence by the test strip in duplicate to determine if the specimen validity test was effective at detecting the presence of the adulterants. The experimentation demonstrated that the iScreen© Urine Adulteration Test Strips were capable of detecting bleach, eye drops, lemon juice, and apple cider vinegar in urine at differing dilutions. It also demonstrated that liquid and solid meat tenderizers could not be detected when added to the controls.