8 ms·

Nanoplastics promote conditions for Parkinson's across various lab models

180 points by ulrischa 3y ago

hapulala89 3y ago
I think there needs to be more studies in the field of nanoplastics. They are nearly everywhere and all man made.
- yreg 3y ago
  Therefore highly difficult to set up a controlled study.
freshnode 3y ago
I've been thinking about this potential link for a while. It would be interesting to see what relationship exists with allergies here as well, which are also becoming more prevalent for reasons we don't yet understand.
Eisenstein 3y ago
Everything about micro/nano-plastic strikes me as another 'cell phones give you brain cancer' panic. There is no evidence that these things cause damage in mammals despite all the alarming research, and every headline leads to a 'more research is needed because this is scary' conclusion. Haven't we learned by now that if journalists are using scary headlines it is because they have nothing better to report, and if studies are concluded with 'we need to look into this more because data is scary' it means they didn't have anything better to conclude? Let's all calm down and wait for the other shoe to drop, if it does, and in the meantime communicate the message: 'these scares happen every decade, it is nothing new and we are still around, let's wait for some evidence before we panic'. And take this opportunity to say 'enough' to single use plastics when there are better options. It is absurd that we let it get this far. Let's go back to glass for liquids at least, and get rid of the 'wrap everything in a layer of plastic' tendencies that are completely unnecessary.
- shortcake27 3y ago
  > and get rid of the 'wrap everything in a layer of plastic' tendencies that are completely unnecessary. If only fruits and vegetables had robust, natural, bio-degradable packaging of their own. Some sort of peelable skin, perhaps.
  - hutzlibu 3y ago
    "bio-degradable packaging" That is the thing: they rot. And if wrapped in plastic, they last longer ... so more fruit makes it to the markets. That being said, I strongly prefer fruits directly from trees that were not treated with 50+ different chemicals.
    - wahnfrieden 3y ago
      less an issue if people eat locally and seasonally
      - hutzlibu 3y ago
        But overwhelmingly they don't.
        mandmandam 3y ago
        In our fucked-up society, yes. We eat sugar and corn, because that's whats subsidized and marketed. Food forests were very much a thing, for a very, very long time. Thousands of years.
        hutzlibu 3y ago
        I think corn was eaten since thousands of years, too. And whether food forests were a big thing and not just common in some areas, is quite disputable.
        mandmandam 3y ago
jtrn 3y ago
I am extremely skeptical about this research. Firstly, the "plastic is bad" narrative is too easy to believe, just because plastic is ugly. It's also starting to follow the pattern I have seen in clinical psychology, where many studies find promising initial results, but no one bothers to conduct the real-life randomized controlled study that shows an actual clinical effect. And after a couple of decades of dogma, someone points out that the emperor has no clothes. Suddenly, the whole field looks silly, be it EMDR, classical psychotherapy, mindfulness therapy for severe mental illness, or the abuse craze in the 1990s. The longer it goes without concrete and clinically significant findings, the larger I think the probability of the findings being wrong becomes. I also find it strange that so few of the studies I have read ever comment on the fact that our system might be fully capable of removing the nanoparticles by itself, just as it removes everything from dust to methylmercury. We do not know if this is the case, but the fact that nobody is addressing this further strengthens my fear that there is a lot of confirmation bias going on. Every time I post something like this, I get a lot of angry responses, so I can try to preempt some of them by saying: I am not asserting that microplastics are safe. But the pattern of lots of pilot studies, and few studies that significantly prove the theory, is very recognizable to me. Until someone either conducts a naturalistic experiment with lots of people exposed to large doses of microplastics and compares them to a control group, or we expose some larger animals to microplastics over a long time in a true randomized controlled study, I'm going to remain skeptical.
- corethree 3y ago
  Agreed but. Caveat here is that despite remaining skeptical we should still heavily pursue the idea as a possibility. We should not pursue this idea as if it was dogma.
  - stevenwoo 3y ago
    They did a comparison with graphene particles of the same size and they were neutral to the biological structure in question, only polystyrene of that size would bind to interfere with normal cell function in vitro and mice.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
wcoenen 3y ago
I had trouble finding the actual paper, but I think this is a preprint: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10602106/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10602106/
- Sparkyte 3y ago
  I'll wait for this to be TLDR'ed through ChatGPT. It uses a lot of high speak, it seems to conclude that nano-particles not just plastics have an effect on proximity to neurons under the right conditions.
- beowulfey 3y ago
  Here’s the version in Science Advances: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adi8716 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adi8716
- pcrh 3y ago
  I've quickly scanned the paper. It convincingly shows that nanoplastics can promote aggregation of α-synuclein (a key protein in Parkinson's pathology) in vitro and in cultured cells. Note however that many substances known to be safe can do this. The in vivo study involves injecting nanoplastics directly into the brain of mice along with human α-synuclein fibrils, so is one step up from in vitro work but still quite artificial. In sum, it does not demonstrate that nanoplastics in the environment, or even those that might be directly administered to mice, e.g. in food, have any effect on Parkinson's-like symptoms or pathology. Edit: I should add that laboratory mice are often in contact with plastics that they chew on. So it's highly unlikely that ingesting plastics has any effect on mouse models of Parkinson's as this would have been noted decades ago.
  - throwaway290 3y ago
    > laboratory mice are often in contact with plastics that they chew on. So it's highly unlikely that ingesting plastics has any effect on mouse models of Parkinson's as this would have been noted decades ago Doesn't it only mean there were no control group? Just like when they found out that mice suddenly started dying less when they raised lab temp a bit.
CyberDildonics 3y ago
Are nanoplastics worse than microplastics? Will picoplastics be even worse?
- EGreg 3y ago
  femtoplastics and zettoplastics might be even worse, it's a bit like homeopathy

180 points by ulrischa 3y ago

hapulala89 3y ago

I think there needs to be more studies in the field of nanoplastics. They are nearly everywhere and all man made.

yreg 3y ago
Therefore highly difficult to set up a controlled study.

freshnode 3y ago

I've been thinking about this potential link for a while. It would be interesting to see what relationship exists with allergies here as well, which are also becoming more prevalent for reasons we don't yet understand.

Eisenstein 3y ago

Everything about micro/nano-plastic strikes me as another 'cell phones give you brain cancer' panic. There is no evidence that these things cause damage in mammals despite all the alarming research, and every headline leads to a 'more research is needed because this is scary' conclusion. Haven't we learned by now that if journalists are using scary headlines it is because they have nothing better to report, and if studies are concluded with 'we need to look into this more because data is scary' it means they didn't have anything better to conclude? Let's all calm down and wait for the other shoe to drop, if it does, and in the meantime communicate the message: 'these scares happen every decade, it is nothing new and we are still around, let's wait for some evidence before we panic'. And take this opportunity to say 'enough' to single use plastics when there are better options. It is absurd that we let it get this far. Let's go back to glass for liquids at least, and get rid of the 'wrap everything in a layer of plastic' tendencies that are completely unnecessary.

shortcake27 3y ago
> and get rid of the 'wrap everything in a layer of plastic' tendencies that are completely unnecessary. If only fruits and vegetables had robust, natural, bio-degradable packaging of their own. Some sort of peelable skin, perhaps.
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  "bio-degradable packaging" That is the thing: they rot. And if wrapped in plastic, they last longer ... so more fruit makes it to the markets. That being said, I strongly prefer fruits directly from trees that were not treated with 50+ different chemicals.
  - wahnfrieden 3y ago
    less an issue if people eat locally and seasonally
    - hutzlibu 3y ago
      But overwhelmingly they don't.
      - mandmandam 3y ago
        In our fucked-up society, yes. We eat sugar and corn, because that's whats subsidized and marketed. Food forests were very much a thing, for a very, very long time. Thousands of years.
        hutzlibu 3y ago
        I think corn was eaten since thousands of years, too. And whether food forests were a big thing and not just common in some areas, is quite disputable.
        mandmandam 3y ago

jtrn 3y ago

I am extremely skeptical about this research. Firstly, the "plastic is bad" narrative is too easy to believe, just because plastic is ugly. It's also starting to follow the pattern I have seen in clinical psychology, where many studies find promising initial results, but no one bothers to conduct the real-life randomized controlled study that shows an actual clinical effect. And after a couple of decades of dogma, someone points out that the emperor has no clothes. Suddenly, the whole field looks silly, be it EMDR, classical psychotherapy, mindfulness therapy for severe mental illness, or the abuse craze in the 1990s. The longer it goes without concrete and clinically significant findings, the larger I think the probability of the findings being wrong becomes. I also find it strange that so few of the studies I have read ever comment on the fact that our system might be fully capable of removing the nanoparticles by itself, just as it removes everything from dust to methylmercury. We do not know if this is the case, but the fact that nobody is addressing this further strengthens my fear that there is a lot of confirmation bias going on. Every time I post something like this, I get a lot of angry responses, so I can try to preempt some of them by saying: I am not asserting that microplastics are safe. But the pattern of lots of pilot studies, and few studies that significantly prove the theory, is very recognizable to me. Until someone either conducts a naturalistic experiment with lots of people exposed to large doses of microplastics and compares them to a control group, or we expose some larger animals to microplastics over a long time in a true randomized controlled study, I'm going to remain skeptical.

corethree 3y ago
Agreed but. Caveat here is that despite remaining skeptical we should still heavily pursue the idea as a possibility. We should not pursue this idea as if it was dogma.
- stevenwoo 3y ago
  They did a comparison with graphene particles of the same size and they were neutral to the biological structure in question, only polystyrene of that size would bind to interfere with normal cell function in vitro and mice.
- marcosdumay 3y ago

wcoenen 3y ago

I had trouble finding the actual paper, but I think this is a preprint: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10602106/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10602106/

Sparkyte 3y ago
I'll wait for this to be TLDR'ed through ChatGPT. It uses a lot of high speak, it seems to conclude that nano-particles not just plastics have an effect on proximity to neurons under the right conditions.
beowulfey 3y ago
Here’s the version in Science Advances: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adi8716 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adi8716
pcrh 3y ago
I've quickly scanned the paper. It convincingly shows that nanoplastics can promote aggregation of α-synuclein (a key protein in Parkinson's pathology) in vitro and in cultured cells. Note however that many substances known to be safe can do this. The in vivo study involves injecting nanoplastics directly into the brain of mice along with human α-synuclein fibrils, so is one step up from in vitro work but still quite artificial. In sum, it does not demonstrate that nanoplastics in the environment, or even those that might be directly administered to mice, e.g. in food, have any effect on Parkinson's-like symptoms or pathology. Edit: I should add that laboratory mice are often in contact with plastics that they chew on. So it's highly unlikely that ingesting plastics has any effect on mouse models of Parkinson's as this would have been noted decades ago.
- throwaway290 3y ago
  > laboratory mice are often in contact with plastics that they chew on. So it's highly unlikely that ingesting plastics has any effect on mouse models of Parkinson's as this would have been noted decades ago Doesn't it only mean there were no control group? Just like when they found out that mice suddenly started dying less when they raised lab temp a bit.

CyberDildonics 3y ago

Are nanoplastics worse than microplastics? Will picoplastics be even worse?

EGreg 3y ago
femtoplastics and zettoplastics might be even worse, it's a bit like homeopathy