A Spoonful of Microplastics in Our Brain Can’t Be Good

From the category of stuff that can’t be good. a study in Nature Medicine this week documents a spoonful of microplastics accumulating in an typical human brain. Alexander Nihart and colleagues used diverse methods to detect microplastics in various tissues (kidney, liver, and brain) of deceased individuals from 2016 and 2024. They found these particles in all of those tissues. The accumulation appears to be growing greater over time. It was also greater in the brains of persons who died with a documented diagnosis of dementia.

Senior author Matthew Campen is a distinguished professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of New Mexico. He expressed alarm at these findings:

“I never would have imagined it was this high. I certainly don’t feel comfortable with this much plastic in my brain, and I don’t need to wait around 30 more years to find out what happens if the concentrations quadruple.”

Implications for Metabolic Health

Plastics are a source of endocrine disrupting chemicals. So these findings imply that we should be concerned about microplastics potentially contributing to metabolic disease and obesity risk. A recent review in Environmental Science and Pollution Research tells us that we have much to learn about the effects of these particles. But the available knowledge offers good reasons for concern:

“Upon entering organisms, microplastics and nanoplastics (M-NPs) have been reported to cause inflammation and oxidative stress and result in abnormalities in glycolipid metabolism. Furthermore, research suggests that exposure to M-NPs may act as a causative agent for metabolic and cardiovascular diseases such as diabetes, obesity, and atherosclerosis.

No, this is not good. Filling the world with plastic waste means that we are filling our bodies with it. And we are only scratching the surface of understanding the health implications.

Click here for the paper in Nature Medicine, here and here for further reporting. For the review from ESPR, click here. For more about the disease burden from endocrine disrupting chemicals in plastics, click here.

Plastic Consumption Tools, photograph by Scott Bauer for the Agricultural Research Service / Wikimedia Commons

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February 6, 2025