Conversation Dopamine-regulating drugs known as “Happy Pills” are often prescribed to boost the mood of depressed patients. These are widely prescribed and can be detected in human urine, making them one of the major contributors to dopamine in the environment. Human waste is processed by treated plants to remove harmful pathogens, but dopamine does not fit this bond and flows freely in such environments.
The drugs we take are reflected in our urine and at the end of the sewage expansion the animals may occasionally endure the stress of drug use (e.g. the plight of London’s eels).A new study published in the Journal of the Proceedings of the Royal Society found that its side effects are not always bad, as water droplets that come in contact with antidepressants in human waste have experienced a real baby boom.
Conversation Dopamine-regulating drugs known as “Happy Pills” are often prescribed to boost the mood of depressed patients. These are widely prescribed and can be detected in human urine, making them one of the major contributors to dopamine in the environment. Human waste is processed by treated plants to remove harmful pathogens, but dopamine does not fit this bond and flows freely in such environments.
In the new study, researchers wanted to find out how this flow of dopamine is affecting Daphnia magna. These organisms are the zooplankton, which is extremely common in freshwater and is an organic ingredient for health maintenance that they test for algae and bacteria as well as provide food for many more aquatic species.
They exposed dopamine to both dopamine and dopamine re-uptake inhibitor bupropion (a drug used to help reduce depression and stop smoking) and recorded how it changed the progeny’s life cycle trends, including growth and reproduction rates, across two experimental controls a Food and a low. Both treatments were persuasive for change but Daphnia had a more pronounced effect of control with less food as they grew faster and gave birth to more children.
“In this study, we examined how food in dopamine D-magna greatly mediates responses to life-history traits, including aqueous exposure to dopamine and the antidepressant bupropion, a dopamine reuptake inhibitor.”Our findings emphasize the role of the dopamine system as a regulator of food-responsiveness and show that low but environmentally relevant concentrations of bupropion may alter de Magna’s life history, leading to potential consequences for individual fitness.”
