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Controversy on detecting microplastics in the human body!
Very interesting article in The Guardian. When I was a kid in the '60s and '70s, we had glass bottles, tin and aluminum cans. But the petroleum industry knew that they could make plastic out of what they were extracting, and suddenly we had this huge outlay of plastic crap: PROFITS! Now glass bottles are almost only seen in alcohol containers, largely the same with aluminum cans. Plastic is everywhere and it's hard to drive for a day without seeing a grocery bag in or blowing across the street. We eat microplastics, we breathe microplastics, they're everywhere.
We've been told that our bodies are simply full of microplastics. Some pay $8,000+ to do through dialysis like those with failed kidneys go through to supposedly rid their bodies of microplastics.
Now there's questions being raised.
From The Guardian article: "...micro- and nanoplastic particles are tiny and at the limit of today’s analytical techniques, especially in human tissue. There is no suggestion of malpractice, but researchers told the Guardian of their concern that the race to publish results, in some cases by groups with limited analytical expertise, has led to rushed results and routine scientific checks sometimes being overlooked.
The Guardian has identified seven studies that have been challenged by researchers publishing criticism in the respective journals, while a recent analysis listed 18 studies that it said had not considered that some human tissue can produce measurements easily confused with the signal given by common plastics."
Another very telling excerpt: “Levels of microplastics in human brains may be rapidly rising” was the shocking headline reporting a widely covered study in February. The analysis, published in a top-tier journal and covered by the Guardian, said there was a rising trend in micro- and nanoplastics (MNPs) in brain tissue from dozens of postmortems carried out between 1997 and 2024.
However, by November, the study had been challenged by a group of scientists with the publication of a “Matters arising” letter in the journal. In the formal, diplomatic language of scientific publishing, the scientists said: “The study as reported appears to face methodological challenges, such as limited contamination controls and lack of validation steps, which may affect the reliability of the reported concentrations.”
One of the team behind the letter was blunt. “The brain microplastic paper is a joke,” said Dr Dušan Materić, at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany. “Fat is known to make false-positives for polyethylene. The brain has [approximately] 60% fat.” Materić and his colleagues suggested rising obesity levels could be an alternative explanation for the trend reported in the study.
Materić said: “That paper is really bad, and it is very explainable why it is wrong.” He thinks there are serious doubts over “more than half of the very high impact papers” reporting microplastics in biological tissue."
False positives mimicking polyethylene. Contamination control problems. Interesting. I run into a similar thing when I get certain types of bloodwork done: my quantities are below the calibration level of the equipment. I might have certain types of antibodies, but they can't be easily detected, therefor they are functionally zero. But if we don't know how much microplastic is building up in people or animals, how can we know how much of a threat it is? It's easy to say that anything greater than zero is not good, but we commonly are exposed to air pollution and environmental pollutants that are greater than zero and live with minimal or no health problems. Of course, there are others living in areas with greater levels of pollution, or people with greater health risks, where it is a problem.
And that's the problem: we just don't know.
Which obviously doesn't mean that we can ignore the problem. Plastics is a scourge, and it may be a major problem. Medical instrumentation improves every year, so we will begin to know. We do know that there are rising trends in mental health impairment as we get older. And also in the young: I read yesterday about a 24 y/o in the UK who just died of frontal-temporal lobe dementia, youngest documented case yet of someone dying of dementia. Maybe it's related to plastics, maybe not. We don't know.
In today's world we're increasingly forced to live fast. And in many cases it seems like dying young is becoming a result. And no corpse is good-looking - it's still a corpse.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/13/microplastics-human-body-doubt
https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/01/14/004231/doubt-cast-on-discovery-of-microplastics-throughout-human-body
We've been told that our bodies are simply full of microplastics. Some pay $8,000+ to do through dialysis like those with failed kidneys go through to supposedly rid their bodies of microplastics.
Now there's questions being raised.
From The Guardian article: "...micro- and nanoplastic particles are tiny and at the limit of today’s analytical techniques, especially in human tissue. There is no suggestion of malpractice, but researchers told the Guardian of their concern that the race to publish results, in some cases by groups with limited analytical expertise, has led to rushed results and routine scientific checks sometimes being overlooked.
The Guardian has identified seven studies that have been challenged by researchers publishing criticism in the respective journals, while a recent analysis listed 18 studies that it said had not considered that some human tissue can produce measurements easily confused with the signal given by common plastics."
Another very telling excerpt: “Levels of microplastics in human brains may be rapidly rising” was the shocking headline reporting a widely covered study in February. The analysis, published in a top-tier journal and covered by the Guardian, said there was a rising trend in micro- and nanoplastics (MNPs) in brain tissue from dozens of postmortems carried out between 1997 and 2024.
However, by November, the study had been challenged by a group of scientists with the publication of a “Matters arising” letter in the journal. In the formal, diplomatic language of scientific publishing, the scientists said: “The study as reported appears to face methodological challenges, such as limited contamination controls and lack of validation steps, which may affect the reliability of the reported concentrations.”
One of the team behind the letter was blunt. “The brain microplastic paper is a joke,” said Dr Dušan Materić, at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany. “Fat is known to make false-positives for polyethylene. The brain has [approximately] 60% fat.” Materić and his colleagues suggested rising obesity levels could be an alternative explanation for the trend reported in the study.
Materić said: “That paper is really bad, and it is very explainable why it is wrong.” He thinks there are serious doubts over “more than half of the very high impact papers” reporting microplastics in biological tissue."
False positives mimicking polyethylene. Contamination control problems. Interesting. I run into a similar thing when I get certain types of bloodwork done: my quantities are below the calibration level of the equipment. I might have certain types of antibodies, but they can't be easily detected, therefor they are functionally zero. But if we don't know how much microplastic is building up in people or animals, how can we know how much of a threat it is? It's easy to say that anything greater than zero is not good, but we commonly are exposed to air pollution and environmental pollutants that are greater than zero and live with minimal or no health problems. Of course, there are others living in areas with greater levels of pollution, or people with greater health risks, where it is a problem.
And that's the problem: we just don't know.
Which obviously doesn't mean that we can ignore the problem. Plastics is a scourge, and it may be a major problem. Medical instrumentation improves every year, so we will begin to know. We do know that there are rising trends in mental health impairment as we get older. And also in the young: I read yesterday about a 24 y/o in the UK who just died of frontal-temporal lobe dementia, youngest documented case yet of someone dying of dementia. Maybe it's related to plastics, maybe not. We don't know.
In today's world we're increasingly forced to live fast. And in many cases it seems like dying young is becoming a result. And no corpse is good-looking - it's still a corpse.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/13/microplastics-human-body-doubt
https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/01/14/004231/doubt-cast-on-discovery-of-microplastics-throughout-human-body
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At a higher level, my problem with studies in general is the ridiculous pressure and incentives on publishing at any cost which have led to the general replication crisis we currently have.
no subject
Yep, publish or perish. Or at least lose your job, which in the USA is close to perish if you need your medical insurance. We certainly know about endocrine disruptors and that bisphenols and phthalates are not good for us, but if we can't accurately measure quantities - this is a problem! Hopefully the state of the art in testing equipment and calibration will make some significant strides soon. Of course, using the equipment correctly helps: they misgendered my wife on a simple blood test last week in which her liver numbers were a bit out of spec. Had the correct scales been applied, they would have been even more out of whack. Her doc caught the problem and she's getting a scan at Mayo in Phoenix next week. Along with more blood work, I'm sure.
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And disentangling the noise is no easy feat! Hopefully the instrument makers and calibrators will make some good advances so we can get better baselines to study from.
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We should certainly be responsible custodians, that's for sure. Definitely treading into thorny territory, I hope we have better analytic equipment soon!
no subject
Hugs, Jon
no subject
Yes, it most certainly does.
Thoughts
* Tiny foreign particles in the body tend to cause problems. This appears with a lot of different things such as coal dust, asbestos fibers, smoke or smog particles, etc. Their sheer size means they get where they don't belong and muck up something. Thus we can predict that microplastics will do the same because of their size.
* We find a lot of dead animals, especially marine life, killed by plastics -- often very small ones such as nurdles, sometimes also with a high load of microplastics. Sometimes the connection is not clear, but other times it is quite obvious; gut blockages are common.
* Plastic absorbs things. You know how if you put spaghetti in a plastic tub, the orange never leaves? Like that. Many of the things that plastics absorb are harmful. So it's not just the plastic alone, it's the plastic plus its toxic payload. Or conversely, a few studies have pointed out that microplastics in the body can absorb medicines, lowering their effectiveness.
* The rate of seriously flawed scentific studies is around a third. Look at any compilation study and they'll tell you the total studies on the topic they found, what they dropped because it wasn't relevant enough, what they dropped for flaws, and what they had left to compile with. The flaw rate is just appallingly high. So when someone says the research on a given topic is questionable, ask if it's worse than the shitty average, or just par for the course in a society that does slovenly research.