The only good news here is that it's possible that the body can clear the plastics. This is from the linked study: > While we suspected that MNPs might accumulate in the body over a lifespan, the lack of correlation between total plastics and decedent age (P = 0.87 for brain data) does not support this (Supplementary Fig. 1). However, total mass concentration of plastics in the brains analyzed in this study increased…
My understanding is the best thing you can be doing along with reducing exposure is regular blood donation
Is there no molecule that could be designed which would break down microplastics throughout the body, without harming biological materials? Or even just the blood stream? I’m not a chemist, but it seems like if this can be done it would be huge.
Even if you could invent it, I don’t think there would be demand for it (yet)
This paper came up as a pre-print. You can't make the extrapolation that the headline is making - they're using gas chromatography to estimate quantities from 1-2mg samples, and then extrapolating to get to these scary sounding whole-organ estimates. If you look at the paper [1], you'll see that the microplastics in in situ samples are not discernible by light microscopy, and that there was a ~25% variation in within…
IMHO the more important part is they used pyrolysis gas chromatography, which breaks down all polymer chains.
Besides man-made plastics, guess what else has long hydrocarbon chains, occurs naturally in humans and other biological matter, and behaves similarly under pyrolysis...
This paper came up as a pre-print. You can't make the extrapolation that the headline is making - they're using gas chromatography to estimate quantities from 1-2mg samples, and then extrapolating to get to these scary sounding whole-organ estimates. If you look at the paper [1], you'll see that the microplastics in in situ samples are not discernible by light microscopy, and that there was a ~25% variation in within…
IMHO the more important part is they used pyrolysis gas chromatography, which breaks down all polymer chains. Besides man-made plastics, guess what else has long hydrocarbon chains, occurs naturally in humans and other biological matter, and behaves similarly under pyrolysis... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatty_acid Here's an interesting related article: https://www.oaepublish.com/articles/jeea.2022.04 Analysis of…
To their credit, they do discuss this in the results. I suspect the reviewers had the same concerns.
Their response is not especially convincing, IMO, but they do at least discuss it.
Hope you never have to haul a family of 4 worth of groceries on a bus.
I do on a bike or walking weekly, it's not that crazy. In a prewar US mid sized city, the density supports multiple grocery stores I can reach in about the same time as driving and finding parking.
Groceries. For a family of four (4). On a bicycle. Sure. How many times a day do you make the trip?
And we need more lightweight cars , not heavier, since tire wear is proportional to vehicle weight to the fourth power. Ironically, CAFE regulations and EV incentives both did the opposite
Do you have a citation for the vehicle weight to the fourth figure? There is about a 2X variation in the weight of the vehicles I’ve owned, but even accounting for differences in tire size, I can’t come up with a 16x difference in how often I change the tires. Thinking about it a different way, there isn’t much difference in recommended tire pressure among the autos I’ve owned. That means that the pressure between th…
Well, it still tells us something. What are the upper and lower bounds of whole brain microplastic content, given that 25% variation?
I couldn't begin to tell you [1]. It's not a 25% variation, once you've extrapolated from the samples by 10,000x (or whatever). The 25% inter-sample error was on a few replicas of teeny tiny measurements. The post-extrapolation error bars are so wide that they're meaningless. The Smithsonian magazine article is garbage. Ignore it. The paper is saying that they see longitudinal trends in plastic bioaccumulation in var…
I may be misunderstanding you, but it sounds like you're claiming that they had e.g. 10 tiny samples of tissue, that their measurements had an average 25% variation across those 10 samples, and that therefore the whole brain estimate (mass 10,000x that of a single sample) therefore has a much greater uncertainty. But doesn't the standard error of the mean get reduced by the square root of the number of samples? i.e. if you had 10 samples with 25% variation across samples, and you're taking their mean, the error of that mean should be 25% / sqrt(10) = 8%. And that should be the relative error for the scaled up whole-brain microplastic concentration as well. Or is there some other source of variation that I'm missing?
why did not they got flushed by our digestive system,yes micro plastics are tiny,still they are too large to get into arteries and veins thus no way to reach the brain?