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

Psychoactive drugs: occurrence in aquatic environment, analytical methods, and ecotoxicity-a review. Environ Sci Pollut Res Int. 2017 Sep 23;: Authors: Cunha DL, de Araujo FG, Marques M 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(-1). 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 per...
Source: Environmental Science and Pollution Research International - Category: Environmental Health Authors: Tags: Environ Sci Pollut Res Int Source Type: research