Recent advances in sample preparation and chromatographic analysis of pharmaceuticals and personal care products in environment

As typical emerging contaminants, pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) are extensively present in the environment with generally trace levels. The continuous emissions and potential hazards of PPCPs have caused primary concerns worldwide. Therefore, it is crucial to develop some simple, facile, sensitive and efficient sample pretreatment and analysis methods for the determination of PPCPs. In this review, the sample preparation techniques for PPCPs in different environmental media are summarized, including liquid-liquid extraction (LLE), pressurized liquid extraction (PLE), liquid-phase microextraction (LPME), microwave-assisted extraction (MAE), solid phase extraction (SPE), magnetic solid phase extraction (MSPE) and so on. Furthermore, the most commonly adopted analytical methods for the identification and quantification of PPCPs were reviewed including gas chromatography (GC), high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and some coupling analytical techniques with mass spectrometry (MS). This review gives an insight into recent advances in the determination of PPCPs in the different environmental samples.