Global Occurrence and Hazards of Benzodiazepines in Water Resources: Knowledge Gaps and Future Directions.

Benzodiazepines (BZDs) are a group of psychoactive pharmaceuticals that are used to treat a variety of medical conditions, such as anxiety, epilepsy, and insomnia. Due to the widespread usage of this class of medicines, BZDs have been frequently reported in aquatic systems. We performed a critical review of the refereed literature to better understand the prevalence of BZDs in aquatic matrices and their associated water quality hazards. Forty-five BZDs were included in this review, of which 20 compounds have been detected in 5 different aquatic matrices ranging across 6 continents. Most of the aquatic monitoring observations for BZDs were available from Europe, with 1434 maximum measured environmental concentration data points, while 428 and 144 data points were reported from Asia and North America, respectively. Monitoring data gaps were identified in Antarctica, South America, Oceania, and Africa. The highest concentrations of BZDs were detected in effluent samples. Probabilistic environmental hazard assessments were then performed for compounds with sufficient data using therapeutic hazard values (THVs) and predicted no effect concentrations (PNECs). Almost 100% exceedances of traditional morphometric and behavior PNECs were observed for temazepam and diazepam in African surface waters. The highest THV exceedance among all compounds was observed for temazepam at 11.93% in effluent across all geographic areas. Numerous ecotoxicity data gaps were present for almost all BZDs; in fact, sufficient toxicity data to calculate both morphometric and behavioral PNECs was only available for diazepam, oxazepam, and temazepam. Our findings highlight important water quality hazards among global regions and aquatic matrices, which can inform future research efforts to understand and manage BZDs in the environment.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Environmental Pollution

• Publication date

  2025-07-01

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.envpol.2025.126921PMID 40749771
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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