Determination of pharmaceuticals in environmental and biological matrices using pressurised liquid extraction--are we developing sound extraction methods?

Pressurised liquid extraction (PLE) is now a well established and extensively applied extraction technique in environmental analysis for pollutants such as persistent organic pollutants (POPs). During the past decade, an emerging group of environmentally interesting analytes are pharmaceuticals that are continuingly released into the environment. This class is comprised with compounds of various properties. As the field of the analysis of these compounds grows, an increasing number of PLE methods for pharmaceuticals of varying quality are developed and published. This review summarises the critical PLE parameters during PLE method development and highlight them with examples from recently published papers utilising pressurised liquid extraction for the determination of pharmaceuticals in environmental and biological matrices. These recent methods are summarised and critically discussed with the aim to provide important reflections to alleviate in future PLE development for pharmaceuticals in environmental matrices. Copyright 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.