What is meant by toxicology testing?
Toxicology testing falls into several categories. One category involves testing for drugs in a patient who comes to the emergency department in a hospital with signs and symptoms related to drug toxicity, i.e. clinical toxicology. In this case, laboratories may perform a “drugs of abuse screen” by a technology known as immunoassay on blood or urine obtained from a patient. The most commonly abused drugs such as amphetamines, barbiturates, benzodiazepines, cocaine, marijuana, methadone and opioids are screened first. In these patients that present to an emergency department for a drug overdose or toxicity, confirmation testing can be performed using more sophisticated instrumentation such as chromatography (gas, liquid or thin layer) alone or in combination with mass spectrometry if it is needed. Another kind of toxicology testing is postmortem drug testing or forensic toxicology. Forensic toxicology involves the application and interpretation of analytical toxicology for purposes of la
