Scientists Sound the Alarm Over Plastics in Our Brains After Shocking Study

If the thought of having a spoonful of plastic in your noggin sounds bad to you, you’re not the only one. Scientists are sounding the alarm over a recent study showing that microplastics can accumulate in the brain.

Researchers from the U.S. and Canada wrote the commentary, published Tuesday in the journal Brain Medicine. In addition to discussing the recent brain study, they detail the overall science suggesting that microplastics are harming the environment and our health. While more research is needed to figure out the best ways to clear these substances from our bodies, people can already take steps to minimize their exposure, the scientists claim.

Microplastics are any piece of plastic smaller than 5 millimeters. In recent years, scientists have found them just about anywhere they’ve looked—from mountaintop clouds to our testicles to a baby’s poop. But a study published last month in Nature Medicine from researchers at the University of New Mexico sent off a new wave of concern.

The UNM researchers not only found microplastics in deceased people’s brains, they found higher concentrations of plastic in people’s livers, kidneys, or other organs. What’s more, this accumulation seemed to be much greater in recently deceased people, suggesting that plastic exposure has only worsened as of late. They also found a higher concentration of plastics in the brains of people with dementia—perhaps signaling a connection to the fatal neurological condition. The UNM researchers estimated that people’s brains today could be carrying an entire plastic spoon’s worth of these tiny fragments.

Nicholas Fabiano, lead author of the new commentary, published today, cautions that there’s still a lot we don’t know about the health impacts of microplastics. But what we’ve learned so far isn’t exactly encouraging.

“Hearing that there is a spoon’s worth of microplastics in the brain was shocking. As a psychiatry resident, this is particularly relevant, since we currently do not know the full extent this may impact one’s cognition or mental health,” Fabiano, a researcher at the University of Ottawa’s Department of Psychiatry, told Gizmodo. “In the Nature Medicine study, microplastic levels were 3-5 times higher in the brains of those with dementia, which raises alarms, however these findings are not causal in nature.”

It’s not just the plastics themselves that could be dangerous to our bodies, but the chemicals that seep out of them. Scientists have identified over a hundred chemicals in plastic that might harm us or other animals, particularly chemicals that can mimic and then possibly disrupt the regulation of important hormones. These endocrine-disrupting chemicals have been linked to greater rates of infertility, certain cancers, and metabolic disorders like diabetes, to name a few. And there are likely other ways that plastics or their chemicals could be affecting our health for the worse.

“The current evidence base (largely based upon animal and cell culture studies) suggests that [microplastic] exposure can lead to adverse health impacts via oxidative stress, inflammation, immune dysfunction, altered biochemical/energy metabolism, impaired cell proliferation, abnormal organ development, disrupted metabolic pathways, and carcinogenicity,” the authors of the Brain Medicine commentary wrote.

Many unanswered questions about microplastics remain, Fabiano notes. In addition to the unknown long-term health risks, we’re not even sure how these plastics are entering the brain, for instance. There’s also still little we know about how our bodies might flush microplastics away, though some research has suggested that we can literally sweat out certain plastic-associated chemicals.

Despite these unknowns, Fabiano (and many other scientists) have called for governments and policymakers to take action and start reducing our collective exposure to microplastics. In the meantime, people can also do things in their personal lives to limit their intake of plastics. These include: switching from regularly drinking bottled water to filtered tap water; eating fewer foods commonly made with plastic, like certain tea bags (that said, some kinds of tea bags are better than others), or foods that are known to contain high levels of microplastics, such as seafood, alcohol, and highly processed foods in general; and storing our leftovers in glass or stainless steel containers rather than plastic ones.