Cotinine Testing

What is a Cotinine Test?

by Carin Mikos

Nicotine, or its’ metabolite cotinine, is most tested to evaluate tobacco use. Long-term smoking of tobacco products can increase the risk of developing many diseases including lung cancer, COPD, stroke, heart disease and respiratory infections. Long-term tobacco use can also exacerbate asthma and help promote blood clot formation. In pregnant women, smoking can impair growth of the developing baby and lead to low birth weight babies. Because use of tobacco can greatly affect the health of individuals, companies can use nicotine/cotinine testing to evaluate current and prospective employees for tobacco use. Many health and life insurance companies test applicants for nicotine or cotinine as well. Cotinine or nicotine testing may be ordered whenever an evaluation of tobacco use or tobacco smoke exposure is required.

Tests can detect cotinine in the blood, urine or saliva. Salivary cotinine concentrations are highly correlated to blood cotinine concentrations, and can detect cotinine in a low range, making it the preferable option for a less invasive method of tobacco exposure testing. The saliva option of this test is quite simple and reliable. A small cotton tipped swab gets placed into your mouth, chewed and/or moistened for 2 minutes, then it is placed into the kit and the results are available in ten minutes. Results are read not in a quantitative way, but rather just a positive or negative presence of cotinine.

If you would like more information on Cotinine testing, vaccines, travel immunizations or other health and wellness related programs, please contact us at Top Wellness.