Psychoactive drugs: occurrence in aquatic environment, analytical methods, and ecotoxicity—a review

Abstract

This review focused on seven psychoactive drugs being six benzodiazepines (alprazolam, bromazepam, clonazepam, diazepam, lorazepam, and oxazepam) and one antidepressant (citalopram) widely consumed by modern society and detected in different aqueous matrices (drinking water, surface water, groundwater, seawater, estuary water, influent and effluent of wastewater treatment plants). The review included 219 selected scientific papers from which 1642 data/entries were obtained, each entry corresponding to one target compound in one aqueous matrix. Concentrations of all investigated drugs in all aqueous matrices varied from 0.14 to 840,000 ng L. Citalopram presented the highest concentrations in the aqueous matrices. Based on the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney test, differences between wastewater influents and effluents were not significant for most wastewater categories, suggesting that conventional wastewater treatment systems as such do not remove or remove partially these compounds. High-income countries showed much lower concentrations in surface water than the group formed by upper-middle-, lower-middle-, and low-income countries. Regarding analytical methods, solid-phase extraction (SPE) was by far the most used extraction method (83%) and performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) (73%) coupled to mass spectrometry (99%) the most common analytical method. Changes in behavior and in survival rates were the most common effects reported on bioindicators (aquatic species) due to the presence of these drugs in water. Concentrations of psychoactive drugs found in surface waters were most of the time within the range that caused measurable toxic effects in ecotoxicity assays.

Current Applications of Magnetic Nanomaterials for Extraction of Mycotoxins, Pesticides, and Pharmaceuticals in Food Commodities

“…Once these pollutants enter surface or ground water resources, they can eventually contaminate drinking and agricultural water systems, thus finding their way into various food commodities. The presence of these pollutants and contaminants in food and the environment has received considerable attention in terms of research in identifying, monitoring, technologies for their removal, and implementing legislation to address the issue [ 2 , 4 , 5 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 ].…”

Degradation of 17 Benzodiazepines by the UV/H2O2 Treatment

“…Pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) in water environments are a well-recognized concern due to their widespread occurrence and potential harm to environmental organisms (Yang et al, 2017;Danner et al, 2019;Patel et al, 2019;Lu et al, 2020Lu et al, , 2022. Benzodiazepines, a main class of psychoactive drugs, have pharmacological effects such as sedative-hypnotic, anxiolytic, anticonvulsant, antiepileptic, and muscle relaxant (Cunha et al, 2017). According to the annual report of International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), benzodiazepines have been used in more than 80 countries, and the global manufacture amount of benzodiazepines was over 195 tons in 2019.…”

Formation of biologically active benzodiazepine metabolites in Arabidopsis thaliana cell cultures and vegetable plants under hydroponic conditions

“…The use of pharmaceutical compounds has increased with population growth and economic development, resulting in over 1500 compounds currently in circulation (Guo et al, 2016). Their widespread consumption has led to their occurrence in TWW as well as in TWWimpacted surface water (Cunha et al, 2017;Xiang et al, 2018). For many of these pharmaceuticals, there is limited knowledge about their potential chronic effects in the environment (Archer et al, 2017;Bourdat-Deschamps et al, 2017).…”