A new model predicts how the drugs affect the environment.
article has been published in ‘ Water Air and Soil Pollution ’.
-The majority of synthetic chemical products incorporated in goods end his unbroken life cycle in the environment. To the risks to the environment and human health, researchers from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) have developed a new tool to predict the fate of current and future drugs effectively,
Spain, 2011-August thousands of pharmaceuticals, most diverse and consumed, they are partially ” metabolized by the body. Those drugs that remain unchanged reach wastewater treated in sewage treatment plants, which are not always designed to remove synthetic organic compounds.
Sometimes even certain substrates can revert to the original drug within the same plant and increase the concentration of drug in the output of the effluent from the plant, as it is the case of carbamazepine (anticonvulsant drug psicótropo) ”, explains Xavier Domenech, co-author and researcher at the Department of chemistry of the UAB
a wide variety of drugs which may be harmful to wildlife reach environment.
the result is that wild. reach a wide variety of drugs which may be harmful to the life environment concern increases when we talk about the purification of water for human consumption, where more and more is detected the presence of a cocktail of drugs to low concentration (nanograms per liter), the effect of which in the long run it is not known ”, says Domenech.
Determine the effect of the drug
The study, published in Water Air and Soil Pollution, has allowed to develop a new tool that determines the possibility of drugs end up in the environment and what concentration, thus fulfilling the obligation of the European Medicines Agency (EMEA, for its acronym in English) to assess the environmental risks of new drugs that want to commercialize.
The new tool, developed by Marc Ribera, lead author of the research, uses a few properties physico-chemical and the rate of consumption of drugs in Spain between 1999 and 2006 to determine its environmental performance. Tested drugs that are the most consumed in Spain (more than 1 mg of active substance per person per year) have been among many others, ibuprofen, diazepam, naproxen, omeprazole, paracetamol.
To validate the model, the team of researchers compared the results of the prediction of the model in water, with values measured by other authors in rivers and lakes. Applied model predicts good experimental data and can become a good model of prediction for the assessment of environmental risks of current drugs and those who intend to be marketed ”, concludes Domenech.
bibliographic references:
Domenech, Xavier; Ribera, Marc; PEAR, José. Assessment of Pharmaceuticals Fate in a Model Environment ” Water Air and Soil Pollution 218 (1 – 4): 413-422, June 2011.
