Air- agitated Liquid–Liquid Microextraction and gas chromatographic determination of some polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in hookah water and hookah smoke

In this study, Air-agitated liquid–liquid microextraction (AALLME) with low solvent consumption was demonstrated for gas chromatographic determination of some polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) as carcinogenic and mutagenic compounds in aqueous samples. Factors affecting the extraction process, such as extracting solvent type, extracting solvent volume, number of agitation, ionic strength, and centrifugation time, were investigated thoroughly and optimized. Under the optimized conditions, the method provided a good linearity in the range of 0.05 to 120 ng mL-1 (R2 ≥ 0.995), low limits of detection (0.015 to 0.05 ng mL-1), good repeatability of the extractions (RSDs below 9.8%, n = 5), and the enrichment factors (EFs) were found to be in the range of 327 to 773. This is the first report on the utilization of AALLME for extraction of PAHs and results showed that AALLME can be a good choice for efficient micro-extraction of these compounds. In order to investigate this common view among some of people that hookah smoke can be healthy due to passing through water, both the hookah water and the hookah smoke were analyzed.