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It would be worth checking that the concentrations of microplastics used in this study are of a similar concentration to those found naturally. Otherwise the re
by JR1427 3y ago
It would be worth checking that the concentrations of microplastics used in this study are of a similar concentration to those found naturally. Otherwise the research is not very meaningful.
- nologic01 3y agoCould you elaborate on naturally found microplastics?
- JR1427 3y agoI meant microplastic concentrations in the real world, i.e. not in a lab. If the concentrations of those used in a lab are far in excess of those in the real world, then these results may be of less concern.
- JR1427 3y agoIn the paper they mention a concentration of 20ug/ml. I haven't compared this to what is typical for drinking water, food, etc.
- balaji1 3y agogood one haha... nologic but savage... (commenter's handle is nologic, this is supposed to be a pun)
- shaunregenbaum 3y agoTap water contains about 1.67–2.08 ug/ml of nanoplastics on the larger side (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0013935121014353 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00139...) So this article was working with concentrations 10x larger on mice (usually worse ability to filter). Beyond that, they admitted that microplastics did not induce an effect which is most of the plastics found in the ocean, etc...
- shawndrost 3y ago"1.67–2.08 ug/ml" is incorrect. Your link states "1.67–2.08 ug/L". In other words, the paper is about the effects of nanoplastic concentrations which are 10,000x greater than in tap water.
- bboygravity 3y agoYeah ok, I'm going to keep drinking tap-water and stop reading clickbait "science" articles.
- hinkley 3y agoMany nasty chemicals are attracted to plastic particles. As bad as the plastics are, they may be carrying something nastier. Get some nice PCBs stuck to plastic particles and they may not trip contamination sensors, but get deposited in your body where the PCBs become mobile again and end up in your system.
- zug_zug 3y agoWell, except in the real world whatever amount of nanoplastics we're consuming we consume for decades, starting from in utero. It's obviously not possible to give a mouse a smaller dose of microplastics over 30 years and measure the cognitive effects. This is all to say -- your prior shouldn't be "this thing that was never supposed to go into the body is safe until proven otherwise"
- civilized 3y agoOne relevant bit from the article: > After two months of daily ingestion of nanoplastics at the estimated human consumption dose, nanoplastic-exposed mice exhibited reduced cognition and short-term memory as assessed by standard neurological assessments such as the open-field test, novel object recognition assay, and the Morris water maze. I'm a bit confused about whether it makes sense to feed the "estimated human consumption dose" of something to a mouse when a human weighs something like 2000 times as much.
- habitmelon 3y agoIt's still worthwhile to look at 10x and 100x concentrations since these things bioaccumulate. Whatever negative effects are happening at 1x should be studied as we crank that concentration up. Might be fine now, but in 100 years? We should probably have an idea how the harm/effects scale
- JR1427 3y agoThis is a good point. I hadn't thought about bioaccumulation. Thanks for raising.