Cardiovascular Drugs as Water Contaminants and Analytical Challenges in the Evaluation of Their Degradation

Cardiovascular drugs have been a burning topic in the field of environmental analytical chemistry in the last few decades. Growing modern healthcare has led to the widespread use of pharmaceuticals. Among these, antihypertensives (sartans, angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors) and lipid-regulating drugs (fibrates and statins) are the most frequently consumed and, thus, excreted into wastewater. Their chemical fate during conventional and advanced wastewater treatment, such as ozonation, remains unclear. Analytical chemistry, providing sample pretreatment followed by instrumental analysis, has a tremendous role in water treatment evaluation, mostly from the perspective of parent contaminants’ removals and also assessment of transformation pathways. Ultrasensitive liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC-MS) systems provide many opportunities. By carefully using planned workflows for chromatographic and mass-spectrometric data processing, i.e., suspect and non-target screening approaches, LC-MS allows for the identification and structural elucidation of unknown, predicted, suspected or selected transformation products. Accordingly, some examples and case studies on selected cardiovascular drugs in this review are presented to show the applicability of the used analytical approaches and workflows.