Science: Rut roh! Microplastics in the brain!!

In the last ~4-5 years I started noticing that more and more people are having a hard time checking out of grocery stores and other retail places. In these bouts of bizarre behavior, I look very closely at what the check-out impaired people say and do. They act confused, overwhelmed and/or somehow paralyzed or mentally slowed down. It isn't just old people with this problem. It is EVERYONE! It includes middle-school and high-school students, of which there is an abundance of in our happy little neighborhood. 

When whining about this, I describe the increasingly annoying check-out problem something like this: Fumbling, bumbling, mumbling, stumbling, fiddling, piddling, diddling, floundering, futzing, putzing, dawdling and farting around. I swear, the problem continues to slowly get worse. Either that or I am getting worse. Something is getting worse. 

Today I stumbled across a possible explanation for "impaired check-out syndrome." Smithsonian Magazine writes:

The Human Brain May Contain as Much as a Spoon’s Worth of 

Microplastics, New Research Suggests

The human brain may contain up to a spoon’s worth of tiny plastic shards—not a spoonful, but the same weight (about seven grams) as a plastic spoon, according to new findings published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine.

Researchers detected these “almost unbelievable” levels of microplastics and nanoplastics in the brains of human cadavers, says study co-author Andrew West, a neuroscientist at Duke University, to Science News’ Laura Sanders. “In fact, I didn’t believe it until I saw all the data.”

Based on their analysis, the amount of microplastics in the human brain appears to be increasing over time: Concentrations rose by roughly 50 percent between 2016 and 2024.

The researchers also found much higher levels of microplastics in brain tissue than in liver and kidney tissue. And microplastic concentrations were also higher in the brains of deceased patients who had been diagnosed with dementia compared to the brains of deceased individuals without dementia.

“I have yet to encounter a single human being who says, ‘There’s a bunch of plastic in my brain and I’m totally cool with that,’” says study co-author Matthew Campen, a toxicologist at the University of New Mexico, in a statement.

Fig. 2 Putative plastic particles in human brain tissue

The Nature paper comments on the size of particles obtained from the brains:

In brain tissues, larger (1–5 µm) refractile inclusions were not seen, but smaller particulates (<1 µm) were noted in the brain parenchyma (Fig. 2a–c and Supplementary Figs. 10–15). Given the resolution limitations of light microscopy, we examined resuspended brain pellets by TEM, which revealed largely 100–200 nm long shards or flakes (Fig. 2d and Supplementary Figs. 9 and 16). In situ, we confirmed that particles found in the brain were carbon-based by SEM with energy-dispersive X-ray spectrometry (EDS; Extended Data Figs. 6 and 7). In dementia samples, many refractile inclusions were prominent in regions with inflammatory cells and along the vascular wall (Fig. 2e,f). MNP [micro and nano plastic particles] uptake and distribution pathways are poorly understood, and the mechanism of how nanoplastics are delivered to and taken up into the brain is unknown.

Seven-freaking grams of plastic in a human brain?? That is huge. And it increases over time. No wonder people are not totally cool with that. 

 

Q1: Is ~7 grams of MNP [micro and nano plastic] particles in the human brain a good hypothesis to explain impaired check-out syndrome, or is that just a figment of imagination from Germaine's MNP-polluted brain?

Q2: Are you totally cool with lots of MNPs in your brain?

Not totally cool with it,

annoyed actually

By Germaine: Creeped out by microplastics in my brain and annoyed by check-out impaired syndrome, assuming it is a real thing, which it may not be, but that's a fun topic for another post