Related Experiment Video
Updated: Mar 11, 2026

High-throughput and Comprehensive Drug Surveillance Using Multisegment Injection-Capillary Electrophoresis-Mass Spectrometry
Published on: April 23, 2019
Assessing prescription drug abuse using functional principal component analysis (FPCA) of wastewater data
Stefania Salvatore1, Jo Røislien1,2, Jose A Baz-Lomba1,3
1Norwegian Centre for Addiction Research, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway.
Background:
Wastewater-based epidemiology is an alternative method for estimating the collective drug use in a community. We applied functional data analysis, a statistical framework developed for analysing curve data, to investigate weekly temporal patterns in wastewater measurements of three prescription drugs with known abuse potential: methadone, oxazepam and methylphenidate, comparing them to positive and negative control drugs.
Methods:
Sewage samples were collected in February 2014 from a wastewater treatment plant in Oslo, Norway. The weekly pattern of each drug was extracted by fitting of generalized additive models, using trigonometric functions to model the cyclic behaviour. From the weekly component, the main temporal features were then extracted using functional principal component analysis. Results are presented through the functional principal components (FPCs) and corresponding FPC scores.
Results:
Clinically, the most important weekly feature of the wastewater-based epidemiology data was the second FPC, representing the difference between average midweek level and a peak during the weekend, representing possible recreational use of a drug in the weekend. Estimated scores on this FPC indicated recreational use of methylphenidate, with a high weekend peak, but not for methadone and oxazepam.
Conclusion:
The functional principal component analysis uncovered clinically important temporal features of the weekly patterns of the use of prescription drugs detected from wastewater analysis. This may be used as a post-marketing surveillance method to monitor prescription drugs with abuse potential. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
More Related Videos
16:02Demonstration of the Sequence Alignment to Predict Across Species Susceptibility Tool for Rapid Assessment of Protein Conservation
Published on: February 10, 2023
05:46Identification of Pharmaceuticals in The Aquatic Environment Using HPLC-ESI-Q-TOF-MS and Elimination of Erythromycin Through Photo-Induced Degradation
Published on: August 1, 2018
Related Concept Videos
Drug Abuse and Addiction: Pharmacological Phenomena
Analysis of Population Pharmacokinetic Data
Model-Independent Approaches for Pharmacokinetic Data: Noncompartmental Analysis
One important characteristic of noncompartmental analyses is that drug exposure increases proportionally with increasing doses. This...
Prescription, Nonprescription and Orphan Drugs
The misuse and addiction to prescription drugs is a growing problem that can affect people of all age groups, specifically teenagers. This can happen when prescription medications are used in ways not intended by the prescriber, such as taking someone else's prescription or using medication for...
Mechanistic Models: Compartment Models in Individual and Population Analysis
Therapeutic Drug Monitoring: Drug Analysis Methods