Microplastics block blood flow in the brain, mouse study reveals

[butchkass]

People in a few decades will think we were crazy for packaging 100% of our food in plastic, the same way we think putting asbestos everywhere was crazy back then.

The amount of strokes and aneurysms that are gonna happen in 20~50 years is gonna be truly fantastic.

[lm28469]

Try to wipe your mind and walk in a supermarket as if you've never been in one, nothing makes sense whatsoever. Same for roads in the cities, endless streams of 2000kg+ hunk of steel, plastic and glass, 95% of them transport about 80kg of human, 95% of the time they're just parked taking space for no reason.

Most things we designed are just so fucking inefficient and borderline insane, humans are very adaptable and if you're born in this mess it just seems normal

[BenFranklin100]

Devils advocate here: food has been packaged in plastics for decades and plastic containers have been around longer than that. If plastics were as damaging as you claim, wouldn’t we have already seen this in the epidemiology?

[9283409232]

It does make me wonder how many strokes or aneurysms in otherwise healthy people can be attributed to plastics. We don't have the data for that but maybe random aneurysms aren't so random after all?

[awestroke]

People in a few decades may have too much microplastics in their brain for such thoughts

[ImHereToVote]

We didn't. The experts did.

[harimau777]

Is there a viable way to actually avoid microplastics?

[Zealotux]

I've been trying to avoid them and it's though. I use glass water bottles, ideally would prefer something like reverse osmosis but not so practical. Remove as much plastic as possible in your daily life: clothes, food containers, bed sheets, etc. Don't eat food that came to contact with plastics and certainly don't eat up food in plastic containers.

Vacuum regularly, use a HEPA filtering system to reduce harmful particles in the air, not much you can do when you're outside, living far from roads could help (a significant amount of microplastics comes from car tires, apparently).

[bilekas]

It's pretty much impossible to completely avoid microplastics. They're literally raining down on us at this stage. But it's parts per millions to consider.

I remember seeing a video about how all gortex and basically all waterproof great releases microplastics into the environment and then the rain basically carries it everywhere. If I find it ill post it.

[butchkass]

Joining the Amish ? But they’re finding microplastics in the air at 5000m of altitude, as well as in the blood of fetuses, so even them are probably contaminated.

I think the only things one can do at this point is avoiding the worse sources of microplastics, e.g. heating food in plastic containers

[lm28469]

You can reduce the exposure but I doubt you can eliminate it. Live far away from roads, live outside of cities, avoid all plastic containers for water/food, avoid synthetic clothes/bed sheets/towels/&c.

[thatguy0900]

I've read regular blood donations can reduce microplastics at least somewhat, and that's a good thing to do anyway

[gwbas1c]

I started taking tea out of plastic teabags and dumping it into a tea sock.

[sagebird]

i wouldn’t be surprised if many insults to human health are not relevant in population that exercises vigorously 5 times a week and have good body composition.

for the average american maybe we are looking for straws that break camels backs that are on the edge of breaking anyways

[userbinator]

Have not read the full article but I suspect the dosing and size are unrealistically high.

Smaller particles resulted in fewer obstructions

...and that suggests the whole "nanoplastics" scare is another stupidity which is a moot point anyway because monomers and short-chain polymers are very reactive and unlikely to even persist for long.

[sigtstp]

That was my suspicion as well. This is outside my area of expertise, but from what I can tell the dosing isn't (multiple) orders of magnitude larger.

From the article, they mention about 4 times higher dosing than detected in humans when the MPs enter through medical supplies (including through surgery).

  - "about 12 μg of MPs [microplastics] per milliliter of blood have been detected in human blood. [prev studies mentioned above]"  (I haven't read those references, though, just going off a quick skim)
  - "We would like to bring mouse blood MPs to this level by injection."
  - "the diluted final concentration after entering the bloodstream should be blood of about 50 μg/mL" [sic]

A quick search for levels detected in humans led me to this paper [1] that gives 1.84 - 4.65 μg/mL, though with "a mean particle length of 127.99 ± 293.26 µm (7-3000 µm), and a mean particle width of 57.88 ± 88.89 µm (5-800 µm)." compared to uniform 5-μm-diameter microsphere used in the submitted article.

So the mouse dosing is (compared to humans):

  - 4 times higher than contamination through medical interventions (if i understand correctly)
  - 15 times higher than normal contamination  (only based on the one article)

So higher, for sure, but still rather close in cases with a lot of contamination. Not sure how the particle size factors into it

[1] Microplastics in human blood: Polymer types, concentrations and characterisation using μFTIR https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envint.2024.108751

EDIT: formatting and rephrasing

[drawkward]

This winter was very cold here in my city, but that doesn't mean the planet isn't heating up...

[pulvinar]

This appears to be a poorly done study-- they're showing the mechanical effect of possible blockage, but they haven't shown that microplastics here are any different than particles of other inert substances found in our environment: clays, silt, organic debris, etc. Those have always been in our drinking water and the immune system deals with what gets into us.

[crazydoggers]

Studying a single subject does not make it “poorly done”. That’s not how science works. A well done research experiment isn’t going to test everything known to man. They’re focused on microplastics and they’ve shown what microplastics can do in the human body. And even if other substances cause the same issue, it doesn’t negate that microplastics cause the issue.

If others have a hypothesis that “microsilt” (is that even a thing?) causes thrombosis in brain tissues, than another experiment can test that hypothesis.

[drawkward]

The fact that they have always been around suggest that there is no change to us as a result of their introduction. Plastics, however, have not always been around...