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Microplastics in the human brain
- yapyap 2y agobaity headlines that scare the shit out of you, exactly what I’m NOT looking for on HN
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bhaney 2y ago> not a spoonful, but the same weight as a plastic spoon oh
- SecretDreams 2y agoThat's not great
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- silisili 2y agoThat's both a misleading headline and a really odd unit of measurement. So odd that I wouldn't be surprised if the US adopted it as the official unit of measurement of microplastics (I kid, as an American).
- ryandrake 2y agoHow many Bald Eagle Per Football Fields would that amount to?
- smnrchrds 2y ago- There is a horrifying 512-ounce version that they call Child size. How is this a Child-sized soda? - Well, it's roughly the size of a two-year old child, if the child were liquefied.
- mindwok 2y agoI find this hilarious. Why would they choose such a misleading unit
- card_zero 2y agoIsn't it about the same? How big is a spoon, anyway?
- upghost 2y agodo we need a unit conversion for how many spoonfuls of plastic are in a plastic spoon?? seems like it might be important for this article. Well article says a teaspoon has 7g mass, and just spitballin here but I'd say a plastic spoon has about 1g/cm^3 density. And there are 4.83cm^3 in a teaspoon. So I guess in fact there are 1.44 teaspoons of teaspoon in the brain. Or would that be 1.44 tsp^2...? But I'm an American and I have at least 3 imperial teaspoons of microplastic in my brain or gosh darnit I'm 2 bald eagles short of a touch down. If you know what I'm sayin.[1] [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42958104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42958104
- TZubiri 2y agoSo more
- koolala 2y agoI thought it was our gonads that had the most?
- jdiff 2y agoThis statement isn't necessarily at odds with that one.
- chiefalchemist 2y agoAs I understand it, they took a small sample of brain tissue, extracted the plastic, and then extrapolated that (based on the tissue sample size) over the whole of the brain. This assumes the presence of plastic is evenly distributed throughout the brain, which isn't necessarily the case.
- robocat 2y agoI am hoping that they discover that polyethylene is a natural component of brain chemistry.
- jondwillis 2y agoWhat about polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride, et. al?
- medellin 2y agoI would think that we would be seeing a lit more issues if we had that much plastic just in our brain. But maybe our body doesn’t mind all that much. I guess we will see how things play out in another 30 years though.
- chiefalchemist 2y agoHuberman Labs has been mentioning plastics in the body frequently. Don't laugh, but I'm getting a new toothbrush to be safe.
- mythrwy 2y agoThis is one of those headlines that smells like nonsense before even reading the article (doesn't mean it is nonsense, but the quantity advertised seems implausible).
- megamike 2y agojust a spoon full of plastic helps the medicine go down the medicine go down the......
- shironandonon_ 2y agoI like the analogy where other articles have said we have microplastics in our brain about the size of a credit card (which generally weigh between 4g and 10g) better. Saying a “spoon’s worth” seems to be downplaying the unmitigated potential risk. We have no idea what will happen as we (and all the other creatures on earth) keep storing more and more microplastics in our organs. Nobody is going to stop driving. Car tires are the largest source of microplastics. (actually I don’t drive though so who am I to judge)
- roenxi 2y ago> unmitigated potential risk The risk does seem fairly mitigated, most of us will make it through today fine. The only part of my brain I can account for now is the 1x credit card worth of plastic, all the other bits are a mystery. Death was inevitable before the microplastics, remains inevitable after the microplastics and things seem fine so far. We don't know much about the risks of anything. People regularly douse themselves with mind-altering substances and ingest the weirdest variety of stuff.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 2y agoShortening your period of observation so that the effects have not occurred yet does not mean it’s “mitigated”. And your philosophy of your own mortality is just as reductive, because humans have been trying to survive since time immemorial and do not actively work on their deaths unless in an unhealthy mental state.
- card_zero 2y agoSeems like a more important problem, then, the part where people inevitably die. I mean compared to having some plastic in their heads.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoI mean, what are we really going to do about it? So much chaos in the world, I don't think many are focusing on keeping plastics out of our body. No one's championing it.
- adriand 2y agoThe 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 by approximately 50% in the past 8 years. Thus, we postulate that the exponentially increasing environmental concentrations of MNPs2,14 may analogously increase internal maximal concentrations. Although there are few studies to draw on yet performed in mammals, in zebrafish exposed to constant concentrations, nanoplastic uptake increased to a stable plateau and cleared after exposure15; however, the maximal internal concentrations were increased proportionately with higher nanoplastic exposure concentrations. While clearance rates and elimination routes of MNPs from the brain remain uncharacterized, it is possible that an equilibrium—albeit variable between people—might occur between exposure, uptake and clearance, with environmental exposure concentrations ultimately determining the internal body burden. Which means that if we were to take action on this, we might actually be able to reduce our exposure. Unfortunately, things are going in the wrong direction. I keep thinking it would be nice if microplastic exposure were to start generating the kind of focus and controversy that is currently taking place with vaccines and autism spectrum disorder.
- russdill 2y agoMy understanding is the best thing you can be doing along with reducing exposure is regular blood donation
- ericd 2y agoSo what you’re saying is that leeches as medicine are coming back.
- lemonberry 2y agoInteresting. My father has received a ton of donor blood over the past few years. Once he's gone I'll be donating regularly. My father's alive because dozens of people donated. To anyone here that has made a deposit to the blood bank: we thank you.
- mreid 2y agoI must have some of that microplastic in my brain since I misread the start of the title as "Human, Brian May, ..." and then couldn't parse the rest properly.
- scotty79 2y agoCool. Now how much sand is in your brain? Equivalent of two glass spoons? Sand dust is way more abundant than plastic and similarly inert.
- kijin 2y agoDepends on where the sand is. I don't want that stuff in my lungs.
- pulvinar 2y agoLungs have been dealing with sand dust since there were lungs, have they not? Honest science on a foreign material in the brain or body should be able to present a baseline amount of total foreign material for comparison. If our environment is now 10% microplastics, then 10% of the foreign material found in the brain being microplastics would be normal.
- drawkward 2y agoSuch an easy point, and yet the parent posters dont get it...
- pfdietz 2y agoOr plant fiber. You eat enormous amounts of this stuff that you can't break down.
- crazygringo 2y agoYou're being downvoted, but I think it's a really good question. We eat and breathe all sorts of stuff that comes in nano-sized particles. We've been inhaling smoke from cooking fire, eating plant matter crushed between rocks rubbing against each other, drinking water with dissolved bits of all sorts of things, and so forth for many millenia now. The body seems to have mechanisms to clear most of this stuff out of us over time, no? Isn't our body chock-full of waste products from our cells that are constantly getting flushed out? Is there any reason to think that nanoplastics would be different?
- Kapura 2y agoRemember that car tire degredation is a significant portion of microplastics in the environment. Investing in mass transit is as imperative as it was to move away from leaded gasoline.
- mythrwy 2y agoMove away from big cities and high traffic areas in the meantime is my solution.
- dymk 2y agoHope you never have to drive to the grocery store
- forgetfreeman 2y agoHope you never have to haul a family of 4 worth of groceries on a bus.
- dashundchen 2y agoI 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.
- forgetfreeman 2y agoGroceries. For a family of four (4). On a bicycle. Sure. How many times a day do you make the trip?
- andrewshadura 2y agoWhat's so crazy about that? Never seen a bicycle with panniers and a basket? Or a cargo bicycle?
- jondwillis 2y agoReally regretting chewing on all of those straws as a kid, eating hot food out of all of those takeout trays, keeping my car windows open, living near roads… and…
- _sys49152 2y agoI rode a hard plastic bike seat on my bmx to school and back everyday. eyes emoji. my kids i shoot out will be g.i. joe figurines
- timr 2y agoThis 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 sample measurement of the GC [2], indicating a great deal of uncertainty in the precision of the fundamental measurement (the authors brush this off; see quote below). Basically, you've got an extremely sensitive measurement system being used to make tiny measurements, and then they extrapolate these measurements by a huge factor to get to ug/g estimates. Further extrapolating (to the weight of an organ, say) when you know that there's 25% inter-sample variation, is just guaranteed to be nonsense. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03453-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03453-1 [2] "Both analytical laboratories (UNM and OSU) observed a ~25% within-sample coefficient of variation, which does not alter the conclusions regarding temporal trends or accumulation in brains relative to other tissues, given the magnitude of those effects."
- sympil 2y ago[flagged]
- idiotsecant 2y agoObviously parent post is not making the point you're trying to argue, only making the point that the measurement is flawed. If you are going to address their argument do it in good faith and address the strongest point. This isn't reddit
- pinkmuffinere 2y agoThankyou. I think I will quote your last two lines frequently.
- squigz 2y agoOr just quote the guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. And > Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
- odyssey7 2y agoIs 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.
- ed_mercer 2y agoEven if you could invent it, I don’t think there would be demand for it (yet)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deadbabe 2y agoImagine if microplastics in the brain could somehow be utilized by neurons for really long term memory storage or something.
- TZubiri 2y agoNo
- SV_BubbleTime 2y agoNonsense article, you could fit way more than that.
- mondobe 2y agoPerfect, I was hoping to increase my neuroplasticity.
- knowitnone 2y agoI recognize and acknowledge your humorous post.
- Sparkyte 2y agoIt totally struck my funny bone. It was very humerus.
- HaZeust 2y agoNice.
- nusl 2y agoDoctors HATE this one trick! Click here to find out!
- booleandilemma 2y agoDoes it have a negative effect on us though? I mean, assuming I do have a spoon's worth of microplastics in my brain, I don't notice any impairment. I write JavaScript just fine.
- latentcall 2y agoSo are we okay with this? We don’t want to hurt industries or the market so we should accept this, right? I think it’s extremely important that Nestle and Coca Cola continue to be successful. I certainly don’t mind eating plastic if it means the market does well. Okay I’m sorry for the snark but when these articles come up some are like “the studies are inconclusive of the effects” but I’m just like “there’s plastic in your brain!”
- synergy20 2y agowhy 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?
- stevenwoo 2y agoNanoplastics can be so small that they can get inside most cells even blood cell so could pass through gut lining and blood brain barrier and sometimes are shaped like the key/lock our body already uses for certain intracellular chemical interactions and interferes with the correct molecules doing work, so they can be both inert for the most part and harmful because our cells just don’t just eject them automatically - though there also appears to be some max amount based on exposure level. The vast majority we might eat is excreted in bowel movements and urine and it still accumulates in tissue due to ubiquity. article for laypeople https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2024/12/18/nx-s1-5227172/microplastics-plastic-nanoparticles-health-pfas https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2024/12/18/nx...
- synergy20 2y agoGreat to know the insights! It seems inevitable though as plastics are everywhere.
- kaiwen1 2y agoPre-print paper that concludes “may”, so by implication, also “may not”. And also may, or may not, be harmful.
- renewiltord 2y agoSounds like methodological error. Like your black spatulas. Somewhere they’ve divided by zero, clamped, and averaged or something dumb like that.
- purplezooey 2y agoWell, Vonnegut was right. It's just a dog's breakfast.
- alana314 2y agoI think this is a conversion error. According to the ABC story about this the brain has 4800 micrograms of microplastics. That's alarming, but that is 4.8mg, which is .0048 grams. A plastic spoon is over 4g. They mixed up micro and milli and were off 1000x. ABC news: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/brain-tissue-higher-amounts-microplastics-organs-study/story?id=118431630 https://abcnews.go.com/Health/brain-tissue-higher-amounts-mi... Original study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03453-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03453-1