female doctor and student looking at and pointing at a brain made of plastic

Good Job we Don’t Use All of our Brain – 0.5% of it May be Plastic

September 5, 2024Environment Article

Anyone that has played 5-a-side on 3G pitch will know only too well how it feels to get home and tip up their trainer, only to see countless small bits of plastic fall out onto the floor. Now scientists believe that as much as 0.5% of our brain may be made up of microplastics, with ‘nowhere left untouched’.

Whilst the bits of plastic that 5-a-side players will know of are specially designed, the pieces that are entering our vital organs are more like tiny shards and specks of the material that have come about thanks to the growing ‘plastic pollution’ that has taken over the planet. The question is, is it too later to do anything about it?

Microplastic Exposure

The major issue when it comes to microplastics is that human beings are exposed to them pretty much all of the time. In order to be classed as a microplastic the pieces have to be smaller than five millimetres in diameter. Both those small shards and the chemicals that are used to make the plastics can get into the air as well as water, with some even making their way into foodstuffs.

This gives them a way to get into the body, where they are then able to travel round and end up in the likes of livers, kidneys, elbow joints and even bone marrow. There is barely an organ in the body that they can’t get to once they’re in the bloodstream.

The actual heath hazard of having such microplastics in our human body isn’t known fully, but Sedat Gündoğdu, who studies microplastics as a topic at Turkey’s Cukurova University, believes that a ‘global emergency’ should be declared over the issue. Matthew Campen at the University of Mexico said, “There’s much more plastic in our brain than I ever would have imagined or been comfortable with”.

Studies on animals have linked microplastics to the likes of issues with the immune system, fertility issues, impaired learning and memory and even some fertility issues; all of which will be a concern to humans.

No Governmental Standards

One of the biggest problems when it comes to putting any sort of control in place around microplastics is that the health hazards for humans aren’t well known. Studies have only really begun in recent times, with suggestions being that they could increase the risk of conditions like oxidative stress, which in turn can lead to damaged cells and inflammation.

Cardiovascular disease is also another risk. In the United States of America, there are no governmental standards for plastic particles in water or in food, leading to the Environmental Protection Agency awarding grants since 2018 to look in to ways to detect and quantify them.

When experts such as ecotoxicologist Bethanie Carney Almroth refers to the proliferation of microplastics as ‘scary’, it is probably worth paying attention. Whilst livers and kidneys of autopsied bodies did find some microplastics, the brains contained between ten and 20 times more on average. This led to a study by Campen to refer to the brain as ‘one of the most plastic-polluted tissues yet sampled’.

When the brains of people who had died with some form of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, it found they they contained around ten times more plastic pollution than healthy samples that didn’t have any form of dementia.

Consistent with the Environment

microplastics in the azores

Microplastics in the Azores – Raceforwater, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The samples that were looked at in 2024 contained about 50% more microplastics than samples taken in 2016. That suggests that microplastics in the brain are increasing at a similar rate to plastic in the environment. Given the fact that other papers have found microplastics in the brains of other species, it isn’t really all that surprising that some have been found in human brains.

It means that the ‘blood-brain barrier’ is ‘not as protective as we’d like to think’, in the words of Almroth. The fact that a recent study seems to show that microplastics were in all of the samples of bone marrow looked at is even more worrying.

@antiplasticlady Replying to @Devil👹 here are 10 foods high in Microplastics – and some easy swaps to avoid them #microplastics #plasticpollution ♬ original sound – Tabor Place

It isn’t just the main organs that are being impacted, either. A paper published by the International Journal of Impotence Research showed plastics in the penises of 80% of the men who were getting an implant in their penis to help with erectile disfunction. Meanwhile, a Chinese study showed a quantity of microplastics in the semen of all 40 of the group’s participants.

That came after similar results were shown by an Italian paper from earlier in the year. The more plastic that is being used in every day items, the more shards and pieces of that plastic are making their way into the environment and then into the human body itself.

How Worried Should We Be?

The Food & Drug Administration in the US released a statement that said that the ‘current scientific evidence does not demonstrate that levels of microplastics or nanoplastics detected in food pose a risk to human health’. Whilst that might well be true, it is also the case that we don’t eat food in isolation, so the amount of plastic in food combined with the amount in water and the amount in the air might well cause issues in the long-term.

Researches believe that some small changes can help. You should, for example, drink tap water rather than water from a plastic bottle and also look to eat less meat, particularly processed meat.

Although the exact health issues around microplastics might not be known, we do know a decent amount about some of the chemicals that are used in plastics. Phthalates, for example, can increase the risk of cardiovascular disease as well as death, according to a study. The problem is that microplastics are likely to contain such chemicals, which will then get into the body, making the microplastics an ‘effective delivery system for toxic chemicals’.

Given the fact that there is ‘nowhere left untouched, from the deep sea to the atmosphere to the human brain’ by plastics and plastic pollution, it is something that we should be at least a little worried about.