Barbiturates are potent sedatives that produce sedation, sleep, and anesthesia and coma in a dose dependent manner. They can be long acting like phenobarbitone, short acting like butobarbitone or ultra short acting like thiopentone. But they have a major disadvantage of abuse leading to physical and psychological dependence. When withdrawn, they produce withdrawal symptoms namely excitement, hallucinations, delirium, convulsions and sometimes even death. All this can be prevented if drug use of barbiturates is detected early and the person treated for addiction. But going to the FDA authorized lab every time may not be a feasible one for which home based barbiturate screening is used.

Further they cause acute barbiturates poisoning which makes the detection of these drugs essential. Depending upon the category of barbiturates, they may be excreted early or late but always in urine. This makes barbiturate testing urine reliable and accurate.

Barbiturate detection can be done in urine in several ways. Either you can go to the laboratory and give for the test or you can go a step in to technology and do it yourself using the home based drug testing kits. It can be done either using a single panel that exclusively tests for barbiturates or with a combination of drugs using the multi drug testing panels that detects other drugs of abuse along with barbiturates. These kits are easy to perform, reliable, accurate and time saving.

Barbiturate screening urine can be done only when the drug attains a minimum cut off concentration as devised by the technicians. You just have to dip the test strip in urine and wait for the test and control lines to appear. The test is valid only if both the control and test lines appear and is otherwise invalid. The absence of test line indicates positive test fro barbiturates.

Another reason why barbiturate urine screen is done is that many of the women consume it for therapeutic purposes. But in due course they may become dependent on it. Later on when they get pregnant, they may still continue to consume the drugs which have got the potency to cross the placental barrier and also get excreted in breast milk producing effects in the fetus and child. So when such a mother is diagnosed early of drug dependence to barbiturates, they can be given adequate treatment to prevent the adverse effects of barbiturates on the fetus and infants.

Suggested Reading:
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Behavior In Barbiturate Addiction – Online Drug Testing Company
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