Acetamiprid & Cypermethrin Exposure Mediated Toxicity: A Review of Its Effect on Ecosystem Health

Abstract

The widespread use of acetamiprid, a neonicotinoid insecticide, and cypermethrin, a synthetic pyrethroid, has raised significant environmental concerns due to their frequent co-occurrence in agricultural landscapes. While acetamiprid targets insect nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, causing neural overstimulation, cypermethrin disrupts sodium channel function, leading to rapid neurotoxicity. Their distinct mechanisms of action and persistent environmental presence make their combined impact on non-target organisms and ecosystems particularly complex and underexplored. This review systematically synthesizes current scientific findings on the joint environmental and toxicological effects of acetamiprid and cypermethrin, with an emphasis on ecosystem health. Drawing exclusively from PubMed-indexed research, it examines their occurrence in soil, water, and air, evaluates their individual and combined toxicity to aquatic life, terrestrial wildlife, and livestock, and explores mechanisms of synergistic, additive, and antagonistic interactions. The review also assesses the environmental fate, degradation dynamics, bioaccumulation potential, and the risk of biomagnification through food webs. Given the prevalence of pesticide mixtures in the environment, reliance on single-compound risk assessments may underestimate ecological threats. By focusing on the combined effects of these two widely used pesticides, this review highlights the need for more integrative and realistic environmental risk assessment frameworks. Ultimately, it aims to support the development of more effective management strategies for mitigating the adverse ecological impacts of pesticide mixtures.