Iberian study concluded that the presence of drugs such as metformin in water can induce adverse effects in species such as zebra fish.
A team of researchers from CIIMAR and the Faculty of Sciences (FCUP) in collaboration with other Portuguese (UTAD) and Spanish (University of Santiago de Compostela) entities, recently published a study in the prestigious journal Environmental Science & Technology, in which they warn about the negative impact of metformin – a drug widely used to control blood sugar levels in people with diabetes – on aquatic ecosystems.
Through the study now published, and developed within the NOR-WATER project, led by CIIMAR (with funding from the INTERREG V-A Spain – Portugal programme (POCTEP), the aim was to assess the impact of metformin on aquatic ecosystems and thus contribute to a better assessment of the environmental risk of this drug.
And the results are worrying. According to Teresa Neuparth, co-author of the study and researcher in CIIMAR’s Endocrine Disruptors and Emerging Contaminants (EDEC) group, “the environmental quality criteria proposed for metformin are far from protecting environmental health and, as such, should be updated to safer values, taking into account this and other assessment studies on long-term chronic exposures”.
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