microplastics found in your brains, in the placenta, in your big toe! Headlines that scared us all. Is our body really full of plastic? Well, that’s not yet certain: the studies on the subject are rattling on all sides, researchers argue in The Guardian.
The race to publish groundbreaking results has led to hasty conclusions where standard scientific checks were sometimes skipped and the quality of the analyses left something to be desired, critics say. Key points: the measurements may have confused fat tissue with nanoplastics. Moreover, those nanoplastics are so small that we can barely detect them, and it is unlikely that the slightly larger macroplastics will end up in the bloodstream.
False-positive results
Official criticism has appeared in various scientific journals. For example, ther was an important study last February that signaled a rising trend of nano- and microplastics in the human brain. however,in November,the study was debunked by a group of scientists who wrote that there were various methodological shortcomings in the research. One of the researchers, Dr. Dušan Materić of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany, wrote very directly: “The microplastics-in-the-brain article is a joke.” He explains: “It is indeed known that fat tissue gives false-positive results for polyethylene. The brain consists of about 60 percent fat.” The researchers suggested that rising obesity rates could be an alternative explanation for the trend reported in the study. Materić reacts: “That article is really bad and it is very understandable why it is wrong.” He even thinks that there are serious doubts about “more than half of the very influential articles” that report microplastics in biological tissue.
The brain study is thus not an isolated case. another study, in which micro- and nanoplastics were found in plaques in the carotid artery, was later criticized because no blank samples were tested.
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