Abstract
Wastewater analysis has been demonstrated to be a complementary approach for assessing the overall patterns of drug use by a population while the full potential of wastewater-based epidemiology has yet to be explored. F2-isoprostanes are a prototype wastewater biomarker to study the cumulative oxidative stress at a community level. In this work, 8-iso-prostaglandin F2α (8-iso-PGF2α) was analysed in raw 24 h-composite wastewater samples collected from 4 Norwegian and 7 other European cities in 2014 and 2015. Using the same samples, biomarkers of alcohol (ethyl sulfate) and tobacco (trans-3′-hydroxycotinine) use were also analysed to investigate any possible correlation between 8-iso-PGF2α and the consumption of the two drugs. The estimated per capita daily loads of 8-iso-PGF2α in the 11 cities ranged between 2.5 and 9.9 mg/day/1000 inhabitants with a population-weighted mean of 4.8 mg/day/1000 inhabitants. There were no temporal trends observed in the levels of 8-iso-PGF2α, however, spatial differences were found at the inter-city level correlating to the degree of urbanisation. The 8-iso-PGF2α mass load was found to be strongly associated with that of trans-3′-hydroxycotinine while it showed no correlation with ethyl sulfate. The present study shows the potential for 8-iso-PGF2α as a wastewater biomarker for the assessment of community public health.
Highlights
Usefulness of wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) has been demonstrated in the field of drug epidemiology by assessing the spatial and temporal trends of drug use in different communities[4,5,6,7,8]
The present work is the first multi-city study reporting the measurement and comparison of the endogenous biomarker 8-iso-PGF2α in wastewater
Even though a number of studies have measured the urinary level of 8-iso-PGF2α in humans, most of them were either normalised against creatinine or only reported as concentrations that cannot be reliably compared with the values obtained in this study[25]
Summary
Usefulness of WBE has been demonstrated in the field of drug epidemiology by assessing the spatial and temporal trends of drug use in different communities[4,5,6,7,8]. For a urinary biomarker to be suitable for use in WBE it needs to be stable in wastewater, excreted via urine at sufficiently high concentrations for quantification, specific to humans, and sensitive to the changes in the endpoint under investigation[25]. Association of oxidative stress with specific disease or health has been investigated in a number of studies that have reported the levels of F2-isoprostanes in urine[26,27]. The ethanol conjugates, ethyl glucuronide and ethyl sulfate are minor metabolites excreted into urine following alcohol intake[37] Their suitability as wastewater biomarkers for estimation of alcohol consumption was first investigated by Reid and colleagues in 201138. The study has demonstrated the high stability of ethyl sulfate in wastewater, in contrast to the rapid degradation of ethyl glucuronide[38]
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