Abstract: To develop a simple, validated method for identifying and quantifying 1,3-butadiene （BD） in human blood by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry （GC-MS） and head-space gas chromatography （HS-GC）. BD was identified by GC-MS and HS-GC, and quantified by HS-GC. The method showed that BD had a good linearity from 50 to 500 μg/mL （r>0.99）. The limits of detection and quantification were 10 μg/mL and 50 μg/mL, respectively. Both the intra-day precision and inter-day precision were <6.08%, and the accuracy was 96.98%-103.81%. The method was applied to an actual case, and the concentration of BD in the case was 242 μg/mL in human blood. This simple method is found to be useful for the routine forensic analysis of acute exposure to BD.

Key words: forensic toxicology, gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, head-space gas chromatography, 1,3-butadiene, human blood