Landmark study links microplastics to serious health problems | Hacker News Reader

Landmark study links microplastics to serious health problems

nature.com

54 pointsibobev17 comments

If microplastics are everywhere, how did some participants in the study not have it in their bodies? I want to not have plastics clogging my arteries as well.

If you read the article:

>A study of more than 200 people undergoing surgery found that nearly 60% had microplastics or even smaller nanoplastics in a main artery1. Those who did were 4.5 times more likely to experience a heart attack, a stroke or death

They weren't comparing against people with no microplastics whatsoever, only the ones that had no detectable amounts in their arteries.

My bad, I assumed if you have plastics on your body then you have it in your arteries. If not then I want to know how to not get that stuff in my arteries.

Put another way, say you and I both have occluded arteries, and we are both inhaling and ingesting microplastics because they're inescapable. I have plastic in my clogs and you do not. What are you doing differently?

I wonder about the strength of the argument. It’s a 80 versus 120 people study, with the adverse events being quite low chance events and the risk very much driven by age and lifestyle.

Is there some obvious reason the causality of this would be going one way rather than the other? The 60-40 split and the strength of the effect makes me wonder if it isn't more likely that the high plastic group are failing to keep it out of their cells due to health problems, rather than the plastic itself causing health problems - especially with the mention of smoking and maleness being linked with the high plastic group.

Causality is very tricky in biology and one of the primary focuses of my work.

In this case, they find that those with lots of microplastics also have high inflammation. So, are the microplastics: A. causing the inflammation, or B. microplastics following a path from the gut to the rest of the body due to pre-existing inflammation causing epithelial (surface) cells to be compromised, C. a feedback loop involving A and B.

Smoking seems like it could be linked to absorption via the lungs either through damage or willingness to spend time in outdoor environments most would avoid.

Of course there could be many other reasons for that correlation, so it would certainly be nice to at least know how the plastic was absorbed.

On reflection C seems like quite a good bet :) thanks!

We were using paper bags in the 60s but the oil lobby psy-opped everyone into believing those are worse.

They were objectively worse. They were heavier, carried less weight, and were susceptible to moisture. Maybe those benefits aren't the cost of microplastics or whatever, but blaming the fall of paper bags on "oil lobby psy-op" is absurd.

On the other hand they are compostable at home vs in the environment for a millenia

I think what probably happened is in the 60's we moved toward a culture of disposable packaging. Throughout the following decades, various people decried a culture of waste, and at one point exhorted us to not use as much paper. The original message was "use less paper! Don't use paper bags!" It then morphed to "use less paper! Use plastic bags instead."

You can see the same course in messaging around the three R's, where the original idea "Reduce->Reuse->Recycle" has a lot of merit, but out of a desire for convenience, it morphed into Recycle->Recycle->Recycle, and became a moral crusade wherein we mix totally unrecyclable materials in with valuable recyclables and then throw 90% of the resulting mix away at the destination facility by putting everything non-metallic in a big pile outside to be sorted and then it all washes into rivers.

The original message was trying to get us to move away from a lifestyle of disposability and it instead became a moral crusade for us to take our disposables and just put them in a different receptacle. The real problem has always been disposability, and it won't matter in the end whether we're disposing of paper or plastic. Back when we switched to plastic recycled wood fiber from used paper was totally unsuitable for most purposes, and I would bet that if we went back to largely wood-fiber based disposable packaging we'll see a lot more chemical dumping and used chemicals from the bleaching and washing process end up in a waste stream somewhere else.

Essentially the problem is waste, and everything else distracts from that.

You are right, it also comes down to the individual consumer preferring plastic bags because cold stuff broke paper bags some of the time (2 liter cocacola or juice bottle etc).

Maybe the government should force the use of those bags in certain establishments... regardless of them breaking under moisture or not...

Plastic is amazing if you consider the alternatives (glass and paper) and ignore the negatives. Don’t most microplastics come from textiles as well? Washing clothes could almost be a process designed to add micro plastics to water.

I had read they come from car tyres?

Now, I do hang out with a lot of anti-car people so I'm not sure how credible it is as I've not verified the claim myself.

Why do you seem to think there is one source only?

Are there any studies that show the mechanism that allows the "microplastics" to get into the blood? How large can something be, and still work its way into the blood stream in a healthy person? Thanks in advance to those who know these things.

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