Ecosystems harbour increasing levels of pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs), with industrial and domestic waste as key sources of input. Yet knowledge of how these contaminants move through food webs is lacking for many compounds, limiting our understanding of the potential ramifications. We conducted a systematic review following PRISMA guidelines to quantify global knowledge on trophic transfer of PPCPs. We extracted empirical data from 44 publications that observed field-based trophic transfer of PPCPs. We extracted or calculated trophic magnifications factors for 75 PPCPs and compiled a database of physicochemical properties of each PPCP. Over half of the studied compounds exhibited at least one instance of trophic magnification. Antimicrobials such as enrofloxacin and the sulfonamides were commonly shown to magnify through food webs. We found no global correlation of trophic magnification factor with bioconcentration factor, nor with physicochemical parameters typically used to predict bioaccumulation such as LogP, LogD, LogKOA, and molecular weight. Our analysis highlights a high degree of variability in reported PPCP bioconcentrations and trophic magnifications among studies of the same class of PPCPs, suggesting that trophic magnification may be highly dependent on ecological context. This paper presents the most comprehensive review of the literature on trophic transfer of pharmaceuticals to date, with important implications for characterizing patterns among groups of compounds and highlighting knowledge gaps regarding ecosystems and PPCPs. The work underlines that field-derived empirical measurements of TMF for PPCPs are an important component of contaminant risk assessment and regulation.
Harriage et al. (Mon,) studied this question.
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