Just because you’re made with a Prozac pill, that doesn’t mean the pill is done. Of course, when you swallow something like an antidepressant, that’s not the end of the drug’s journey into the world. It is a beginning.
Most prescription drugs, including psychotoxic drugs such as fluoxetine (known under the brand Prozac), are only partially absorbed by the body when the introduction.
The rest of the chemical ends up in your toilet, where it enters the sewage system.
From there, whatever is not caught in wastewater treatment plants, it eventually makes its way into the ocean, unknowingly masse into the marine wildlife that inhabits it. They’ve never been patients, but they all dream of our doses the same way.
There is nothing new about this. Studies have shown that downstream pollution from antidepressants largely traps fish in drug broth – something brutal that affects their behavior in strange ways that we are not yet beginning to understand.
“The collateral effects of psychoactive pollutants on wildlife are of greater concern,” a research team led by evolutionary ecologist Giovanni Polverino of the University of Western Australia explains in a new study.
“Psychoactive drugs target human brain receptors that are mechanically preserved throughout the animal kingdom; so it is perhaps not surprising that they can affect non-human species. target. “
The delivery of these unrelated drugs is just an open question, but scientists believe that fish in the wild could alter almost all aspects of their behavior with bioactive pollutants: activity , social, feeding, migration, math, and more.
One of the most unknown is how drugs like this may alter animals at an individual level, as most studies of the phenomenon to date have attempted to mediate effects in fish groups. to measure.
To conduct further research, Polverino and his team ran a two-year experiment in the laboratory, subject to generations of pups (Poecilia reticulata) to concentrated concentrations of fluoxetine at low levels, equivalent to chemical pollution in aquatic environments, as well as high levels.
The results were strong: the fish on antidepressants seemed to lose their individual potential as a result of their exposure, with changes in behavior between individual animals decreasing as the dose increased. strong.
Basically, they all started doing the same thing.
“The main conclusion is that harmful exposure to even low concentrations of fluoxetine erodes differences in activity levels between individuals,” the authors write.
By itself, that certainly doesn’t look like a death penalty, but that could be one over a long enough time frame – as there are known to be differences in things like risk taking and other types of behavioral strategies among animals beneficial to species through a combination of ecological and evolutionary processes.
For example, more active and risk-averse people tend to have more resources and enjoy greater reproductive success, which in turn boosts species health, genetic diversity, and overall sustainability, the researchers say.
If all the animals start working in the same way, though – living their lives alike, happy in a sea of frustrations and who knows what else – well, the writing could being on the wall.
“For fish populations to thrive in the face of environmental change, members of a group need to behave differently from each other,” Polverino says.
“Unfortunately, we have found that such behavioral diversity is eroded in numbers of fish exposed to fluoxetine, and could put large groups of fish at greater risk of extinction. dying in a changing and ever-polluting world. “
In fact, even though the researchers tried to reproduce the true levels of exposure to fluoxetine in the ocean, there are limitations to what their two-year experiment could do in laboratory conditions. tell us.
We are still only looking at results from an animal model here, and it is possible that marine life in the open ocean is affected and affected in a different way to this, at least so that future research can the coming of things to prove further.
But again, the researchers’ test may not be the one we should be concerned about.
After all, the real experiment here began almost half a century ago, when fluoxetine was invented as a way to treat depression. It was launched in the US market as Prozac in 1988, and became a generic drug in 2001.
To date, it is one of the most common prescription drugs in the world, prescribed more than 25 million times in the U.S. in 2018.
And all that time, he’s been washing into the ocean.
The results are reported in Proceedings of the Royal Society B..