Dispersive liquid–liquid microextraction for the analysis of specific marker compounds in human exposed with Polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).

• Biomarkers associated with lipid peroxidation, oxidative stress and kidney injury. • Use of validated DLLME method for biomarker analysis. • Analysis of 200 human urine samples of kitchen workers at high risk of PAHs exposure. • The developed method will be of immense use in clinical as well as routine analysis. Occupational exposure of Polyaromatic Hydrocarbons can lead to lipid peroxidation, oxidative stress and kidney function abnormalities. The biological marker compounds associated with these diseases and disorders are present in traces in biological fluids and their quantitative analysis can lead to many clinical applications. Hence, we developed 'Ultrasound assisted dispersive liquid–liquid microextraction' for the simultaneous analysis of 6 marker compounds using liquid chromatography mass spectrometry. The developed method is simple to use, rapid and very precise techniques for analyzing biological marker compounds associated with oxidative stress and kidney injury. The factors affecting the extraction efficiency have been optimized using design of experiment. Under the optimized conditions, the proposed method has been validated and the results showed linearity in the range 1–100 ng mL−1 with coefficient of determination (R2) ≥ 0.974–0.989 for all the analytes. The limit of detection and limit of quantification were in the range of 0.002–0.575 ng mL−1 and 0.006–1.898 ng mL−1 respectively with recovery (%) in the range of 94–116 % for all the analytes. The proposed method showed high reproducibility having intra-day and inter-day precision less than 3.21% and 7.31% respectively. We used our validated method to study the effect of PAHs exposure on human, where we analyzed 200 human urine samples obtained from mega kitchen workers. The results suggested that most of the marker compounds were up regulated in the exposed workers than the control one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]