Concentration profiling of minerals in iliac crest bone tissue of opium addicted humans using inductively coupled plasma and discriminant analysis techniques.

Opium addiction is one of the main health problems in developing countries and induces serious defects on the human body. In this work, the concentrations of 32 minerals including alkaline, heavy and toxic metals have been determined in the iliac crest bone tissue of 22 opium addicted individuals using inductively coupled plasma-optical emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES). The bone tissues of 30 humans with no physiological and metabolomic diseases were used as the control group. For subsequent analyses, the linear and quadratic discriminant analysis techniques have been used for classification of the data into "addicted" and "non-addicted" groups. Moreover, the counter-propagation artificial neural network (CPANN) has been used for clustering of the data. The results revealed that the CPANN is a robust model and thoroughly classifies the data. The area under the curve for the receiver operating characteristic curve for this model was more than 0.91. Investigation of the results revealed that the opium consumption causes a deficiency in the level of Calcium, Phosphate, Potassium and Sodium in iliac crest bone tissue. Moreover, this type of addiction induces an increment in the level of toxic and heavy metals such as Co, Cr, Mo and Ni in iliac crest tissue. The correlation analysis revealed that there were no significant dependencies between the age of the samples and the mineral content of their iliac crest, in this study. The results of this work suggest that the opium addicted individuals need thorough and restricted dietary and medical care programs after recovery phases, in order to have healthy bones.