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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 t

• 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
    If a lot of people heavily pursue the idea without doing any conclusive study, you'll have lots and lots of positive non-conclusive results to publish on any hypothesis, it doesn't matter if it's true or not.
    • corethree 3y ago
      By pursue as a possibility I mean try to get a conclusive result. What you are describing here is "pursue as dogma"
  • Sparkyte 3y ago
    This would be treating a hypothesis as fact. That isn't scientific enough, it would be good to isolate a demographic where plastics are least used and a demographic where plastics are highly used with similar populations. Try to remove or invalidate external effects or properties and calculate the health of the individuals. Health not just alzhimers, because everyone varies differently. This would be almost an impossible task. I'm sure there are more scientific ways to do a study.
    • corethree 3y ago
      No. I'm not saying this either. I'm saying with some evidence it's worth investing more money into causative experiments. This study is that "some" evidence. That means double blind experiments. Your correlative studies don't offer enough evidence. Causation is our strongest scientific metric. Human causative experiments are worth it as well in my mind with paid volunteers who are aware of the risk. But the legal barriers here are likely high. We can start with chimpanzees.
      • Sparkyte 3y ago
        My bad. It just feel like it needs more research.
• swatcoder 3y ago
  You're right that conclusive research can be impractical or neglected for many environmental and social impact "sciences". This is why psychology, ecology, biology, medicine and even chemistry weren't always taken seriously by more rigorous disciplines. No innovation really marked a moment between when they were denigrated as soft sciences that couldn't make sound conclusions and their role in society today. It's mostly just a cultural shift and a loss of implicit skepticism in them. So yeah, it's hard to know stuff like "how dangerous are plastics" as rigorously as "how much energy is released when these two nuclei fuse" But there's also a practical weight that matters in a lot of these pursuits. Plastics overtook the world during a time when people weren't really considering their impact at ecological scale and didn't have sufficient models and tools to really assess what they might do to biological systems over lifetimes or generations. It was a historical accident that happened fast and without many brakes applied and now "plastics everywhere" is a pervasive background noise that's very hard to meaningfully control against. So the controlled science which was never conducted initially, and we now think probably should have been, is almost impossible to perform because we're left in that that fuzzy "soft sciences" place where everything is already plasticked. But does that mean we should just keep charging ahead without trying to look, and that maybe a mindful step back from unscientific historical use would be worth considering even without conclusive evidence (since such evidence is now too hard to gather)?
  • pardoned_turkey 3y ago
    You're cherry-picking plastics here. The same can be said about just about any technology developed in the past 200 years, so what makes plastics special? We laugh at people who talk about the "precautionary principle" for vaccines or cling onto dubious research that purports to show some ill effects. Or, how about applying the precautionary principle to air travel - after all, do we really know the effects on your body of frequently changing timezones? We've been using plastics for a long time. They improved the world in important ways. There's nothing we can detect in large-scale studies of industry workers or other exposed groups that would suggest they're dangerous. That's kind of it. Every story you see on HN about microplastics is hand-wavy and involves dubious assertions and hypotheticals, and the alternative is... what? That we go back to making all commodity items out of metal, with a more serious environmental impact, higher transportation costs, and so on? There are wasteful uses of plastic which should be curtailed, e.g. for packaging fresh produce - but the concern here isn't microplastics, just pointless trash.
• hammock 3y ago
  >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. I know an anti-vaxxer who says the same thing about lifesaving vaccines, but in the opposite direction. He seems to claim that there are few/no truly inert (meaning pure saline, as opposed to aluminum-doped adjuvant without the inactive virus) placebo controlled RCTs for many of the most commonly scheduled vaccines. And until there is one, he won’t believe they are safe. The guy is nuts imo
  • jtrn 3y ago
    I find that people who say "we need real-life practical studies" often have a viewpoint 180 degrees opposite to mine regarding research. They become annoyed when RCT (randomized controlled trials) studies prove that homeopathy or acupuncture doesn't work. They want to conduct "practical" studies with less rigorous design protocols. I want the opposite: I just want an RCT with clinically significant outcomes reported clearly (for example, a tenfold increase in microplastic consumption raised the prevalence of Parkinson's from 2 to 4 percent in the research group). The usual response I get is something like, "that kind of research is really hard to do." My response to that is, "conducting just easy research is not only unhelpful but actually detrimental to the field."
    • krisoft 3y ago
      > I just want an RCT with clinically significant outcomes reported clearly (for example, a tenfold increase in microplastic consumption raised the prevalence of Parkinson's from 2 to 4 percent in the research group). What is the experiment you are proposing here exactly? It sounds like you want to give extra microplastics to a randomly selected group for tens of years, and then comparing the incidence of Parkinson disease among them compared with a control group who was administered some placebo. Is that what you are proposing? If that is what you are asking for then that is a “never gona happen unless you go full Mengele, and even then it is hard” type of research.
• Sparkyte 3y ago
  Even with microplastics, other microscopic things entered food and consumption too. So I am skeptic, but the world also greatly benefits from the use of plastics in medicine. The rate of Alzhimers is not increasing, which would say elements of the disease not all microparticles.
• photochemsyn 3y ago
  'Plastic is bad' is indeed a gross generalization as plastics are made from a wide variety of monomeric units that are linked into chains or sheets to generate the final product. This article is specifically about polystyrene, which consists of aromatic (benzene ring) monomers. These are more likely to have biological effects, although of course there are aromatic amino acids, but there's also bisphenol A, a problematic additive. However, the specific evidence is worth looking at: > "Researchers said the plastic[polystyrene]-protein accumulations happened across three different models performed in the study - in test tubes, cultured neurons, and mouse models of Parkinson’s disease. West said questions remain about how such interactions might be happening within humans and whether the type of plastic might play a role." Another thing to keep in mind is that Parkinson's appears to have a whole lot of different causes or risk factors, which accumulate as we age, from genetics to exposure to organophosphorous pesticides and this is just one more added to the list (wiki): > "PD is believed to begin principally by degeneration of dopaminergic nigrostriatal neurons in the brain and secondarily by complex pathological mechanisms, including mitochondrial dysfunction, oxidative stress, apoptotic cell death, protein aggregation and misfolding, inflammation, excitotoxicity, loss of trophic factors, and other cell-death pathways" So, it's not about 'plastics' in general, it's just that there are specific types and additives that should probably be phased out.
• grecy 3y ago
  I think it's healthy to be skeptical, but also it's good to trust your gut and use some common sense. Plastic is made from refined natural gas and crude oil. We know for a fact those things are carcinogenic. There is no universe where putting them inside your body is not bad, and we should be doing everything we can to reduce it. > a naturalistic experiment with lots of people exposed to large doses of microplastics Are you volunteering to be in that group? Why not?
  • userbinator 3y ago
    Plastic is made from refined natural gas and crude oil. We know for a fact those things are carcinogenic. There is no universe where putting them inside your body is not bad, and we should be doing everything we can to reduce it. This is the type of ignorant generalisation that causes the widespread paranoia we're discussing here. Crude oil consists of a mixture of literally hundreds or more different compounds. Benzene is carcinogenic, and so are a few other aromatics. Methane isn't, and neither are the other pure alkanes. The keyword is "refined". Highly refined mineral oil isn't carcinogenic. Neither is petroleum jelly.
    • grecy 3y ago
      All the same, do you want to put large quantities of them inside your body for a study? Of course you don’t
• beowulfey 3y ago
  This is a molecular study. Not done in humans. It is showing the molecular effects of nanoplastics within cells. Does not claim anything about effects in humans directly, just provides a model for future testing.
  • JPLeRouzic 3y ago
    Thanks for your commonsense comment.
• fnordpiglet 3y ago
  A few points, Plastic nanoparticles isn’t a single thing. There are many types of plastics, with many types of additives. Most plastics are bioreactive, especially when not handled properly or maintained in the proper conditions. A great many plastics and especially additives are known to be toxic, carcinogenic, etc. These aren’t controversial statements and is widely known, understood, and cataloged. Further, in this study, they point to prior studies that have established most adult humans have detectable amounts of nanoplastics in the blood stream. Further the point to prior research establishing many nanoplastics (and specially polystyrene, what they are studying here), passes the blood brain barrier. They contribute findings that, in mice, polystyrene nanoparticles are admitted to neurons and they isolate a number of changes in the proteins and signaling of the cells that propagate to other parts of the brain. The changes are indicative of changes observed in Parkinson’s, but since we don’t understand Parkinson’s, we clearly can’t establish a causal link in this way. RCTs could establish a probable correlate, but given again plastic nanoparticles are a single monolithic thing, there’s an incredible amount of variability in such a trial. This will take a lot of time and need to be pretty narrowly constructed so fundamental research like this is how you establish and guide such trials in the future. We haven’t really focused on the subject very long. But all of the facts above should be of grave concern. Even if the body clears out nanoparticles, which I’m certain it must, that doesn’t mean they can’t cause serious issues prior to clearance. We are also presumably constantly exposed to more so you should view it as a chronic and persistent level in the body even if the body can clear it. In fact I would say unlike heavy metals we almost certainly clear it otherwise you would simply accumulate greater and greater concentrations; which I don’t think is observed. It’s good to be skeptical, but I don’t think “we haven’t established a specific disease caused by the pervasive presence of plastic nanoparticles in animals” doesn’t imply “this is ok” by any measure.
  • jtrn 3y ago
    But you do agree that it would be better if we got some studies that went beyond "particles have been observed in tissue" to something like "This is the dose-to-morbidity curve for this group of nanoparticles"?My issue is that we have been stuck with hundreds, if not thousands, of research papers of the first type, and I haven't found any of the latter type. With regard to your last point, I kind of agree, but there has to be a balance between two extremes. You can't assume something is safe just because you don't have a smoking gun. On the other hand, the "you can't prove it's 100% safe for everybody at all times throughout the universe, so we must assume it's dangerous" position can also be very dangerous. To me, the anti-GMO movement makes this mistake in a serio us way, hurting actual people in deprived parts of the world. I fear that the microplastic scare is overblown and takes focus away from much more important issues.
• xyst 3y ago
  > compares them to a control group Good luck finding a single person on earth (let alone, a group) not exposed to microplastics. The “forever chemicals” were found in even the most remote areas of the world. Wind, rain, storms, and other natural events carry this junk and spread it all over the world. There is literally a massive plastic graveyard in the ocean. Plastics turning into micro/nano plastics. Infiltrating food (fish), water, and carried into populations.
  • jtrn 3y ago
    Sand is a forever chemical. Almost everything on earth is a forver chemical. And this is exactly what is triggering me. 'X has been found in y'. Yes, but can we please have one single good study that shows what the danger of that is? I think it's time for the microplast research to go beyond 'has been found in' stage.
    • redundantly 3y ago
      You lost me when you called a mineral a chemical.
      • hidelooktropic 3y ago
        A mineral is a chemical.
      • jtrn 3y ago
        Sand is largely composed of silicon dioxide (SiO2), which is a chemical compound. Each grain of sand is a tiny crystal composed of atoms of silicon and oxygen bonded together. These grains are formed by geological processes over long periods. While "sand" is a term for particle size rather than composition, its main constituent, especially in quartz sand, is indeed a chemical substance.
        • redundantly 3y ago
          I expected this kind of reply. By your reasoning we can just call anything chemicals, as all physical matter are a mixture of chemical elements. Words matter. Sand is not a chemical.
• dehrmann 3y ago
  The other thing that makes me skeptical is some things (asbestos, lead, DDT) turned out to be very obviously bad. There's the same level of panic with plastics (and not just microplastics), but not the same amount of evidence.
• partomniscient 3y ago
  If you wait too long, because the issue is so widespread there can't be any type of genuine control group because everyone is affected at some level.