Microplastics on the brain?
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Every year, the world produces more than 400 million tonnes of new plastic, according to the UN. Some of it breaks down into tiny particles, microplastics. One thing that I really wish more people knew is how pervasive microplastics are.

It's not only in the environment or like in the oceans or beaches, but it's also in the air we breathe, in the water we drink, in the food we eat, in the clothes we wear. Microplastics, it's actually affecting everyone. That's Dana Jaksolikova, a microplastics researcher from Kazakhstan at the Helmholtz Research Center in Germany.

And although we don't have concrete evidence, scientists and researchers like Dana worry that when microplastics get into our bodies, they could cause serious health problems. So how do they get there in the first place? And what do we know about how they can impact our health? That is what we're looking at in this episode of What in the World from the BBC World Service. I'm Hannah Gelbart.

First of all, I'm going to bring in Dana so we can find out a bit more about her research. Dana, hi. Hi. Why did you choose to study microplastics? It's a growing issue in the environmental field as well as the public health field. At the same time, it's often underlooked and there's not much research going on in that topic.

The more I learn about how microplastics are polluting not only the environment, but also our food chains and human health and how it enters our bodies, the more I realize the importance of this research. I want to be a part of the movement that understands the impact, the extent of problem and possibly finding a solution. Some of the stuff that you find out in your research, you put out as

videos on Instagram. Plastics are, as you say, everywhere. We use so much of them every day. And for some people, this can feel really overwhelming. It can give you quite a bit of anxiety because it can be difficult to cut down on your plastic use. And I imagine if you're researching this every day,

can it feel a bit overwhelming? And is there anything you can do to try to counter that? You can feel a real anxiety, especially when it comes to microplastics. And when you research about that and you read it, it can be quite overwhelming. You're right. But what I try to focus on is the things that I can control. So it's

Three things I usually highlight. It's everything that is related to your food. Try to avoid plastic packaging, for example, around your food. We talk about like plastic bags, plastic containers, plastic bottles. It has a big impact on your exposure to microplastic, like significantly reducing that. We're talking about like billions and trillions of microplastics with each swap. Another thing is textiles.

So clothes we wear every day for many, many hours and bed sheets we sleep on. It's really influential if you swap to more natural fabrics like, you know, cotton or bamboo or wool. And it also feels better on your skin, by the way. And another big thing, it's personal care products. A lot of them, they actually contain plastic microbeads in the ingredient list and they

You put them directly on your skin and they're absorbing. Another big thing that is exposing you to microplastics. As I said, yeah, it's really easy to feel overwhelmed about it. There is time and there is a chance to have a change in that problem. So don't panic about the microplastics. Dana, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me.

So those were Dana's personal tips. But what does the research say about the potential health impacts? I'm here with the BBC's Smita Mundasad, a health reporter. Hi, Smita. Hi. So microplastics are tiny plastic particles less than five millimetres big. How do they get into the body?

They can get in the body. You can inhale them, as in you can take them in when you're breathing because there might be tiny bits of plastic in the air around us, or they might come off tyres as cars go around. And again, we can inhale that. We can eat them. For example, they can be on packaging in food that we eat. They can get into the soil, so they might be able to get into plastic.

They can get into seafood through plastic waste that goes into oceans and then seafood ingesting that themselves and then us eating that. A recent study has found that there are even microplastics in our brains.

Can you tell me a bit more about that study? This was a study looking at around 50 people from the last 25 years living in the United States who have died and they were looking at them post-mortem, looking at their brains and their kidneys as well and they found that

over time, the amount of microplastics in people's brains had increased, probably because we use plastics a lot more in more recent years. But also that there was more microplastics in people who had gone on to get a diagnosis of dementia six times more than people who didn't have that diagnosis. But here's the thing. It could be that people with dementia, they're

illness actually makes it harder for them to clear things in their brain. It could be caused by the dementia rather than the microplastics themselves causing the dementia. I just want to make sure we make that absolutely clear. We don't know what microplastics might be doing to the brain, but this was an interesting finding. How

How do they get into the brain? Because presumably they'd have to cross the blood-brain barrier. Yeah, they must be able to. If they've been seen in the brain, they must cross that barrier. There have been microplastics found in lots of different organs in the body, in the lungs. They've been found in the kidneys, in the liver, even in the placenta.

I guess the question is, do they do harm for sure? And also at what concentration, how much do you need to have in your body for them to do harm? Go on, tell me. You know, there's been lots and lots more evidence over the last 20 years or so that microplastics...

definitely getting into our bodies they're definitely in animals and there's been a lot of research in animal studies and in human cells and some of that research suggests that maybe they can cause harm they can increase inflammation in the body because your body thinks wait this is a foreign object that shouldn't be in us and makes this sort of inflammatory response which perhaps could lead to some different conditions the thing is the

The evidence is lacking. It's mostly in animals, animal studies. And so it's really hard to say for sure yet how much harm they cause. And the World Health Organization did this massive study only a couple of years ago trying to address this because it's very obvious that plastic is all around us.

And they said, really, what we need is a lot more research to work this out. Do we know anything about how they might impact our hormones and fertility, things like gut health?

There's loads of theories out there. They all, well, the vast majority of them come from animal research, research on rodents, research on some of them on human cells in a laboratory and a few more on samples from humans, for example, at postmortem that show that these microplastics get into our bodies.

In terms of what they can do, there's lots of theories. Maybe they cause inflammation in the body. Maybe, for example, when they get into the tiniest parts of our lungs, sometimes tiny, tiny particles in our lungs can cause inflammation and maybe they do the same thing. So people have considered that or they might do the same in the gut. But the

But this is all at the moment. Theories hasn't really yet been proved. In terms of fertility, now this question comes up a fair bit. There are some suggestions from animal studies, again from rodents, that these microplastics might affect fertility in animals. Trying to...

make that jump into humans is really hard because, of course, these animals are really, really different to us. But there is this possibility that some of the chemicals in plastics, not just the plastic compounds themselves, but there are thousands of different chemicals that are added to plastics to give them different properties, to make them harder, for example, that some of these chemicals have kind of quite a similar chemical structure to some of the hormones in our bodies. And so perhaps they could

could disrupt some of our hormones and therefore our fertility. But this is properly a theory that at the moment there isn't proof on this. It's all kind of building animal evidence and we don't really know yet. I want to ask you about some of the plastic things in my life and how much microplastic they might be giving off. I mean, they're particularly things that I kind of eat or drink. First of all, drinking water from plastic bottles.

There are some studies that suggest that some of that plastic from the water bottles might be getting into the water and then getting into us as we drink it.

The question, I guess, is, does that harm us? But interestingly, there was a study really recently in the UK that looked at water that comes out of taps at the same time as water from bottles and found that actually the concentration of microplastics was really similar. What was different was the size of the microplastics. The smaller microplastics were found in the water bottles. And there is a fair bit of scientific thought that it's the much smaller microplastics that

A doctor on TikTok said that if you eat certain vegetables like cabbage, broccoli and kale, that can actually help counteract some of the potentially negative effects. Is there any truth in that?

I saw this too. It's not a bad thing to eat a load of those types of vegetables. They're really good for us. They've got lots of fibre. They help food get through our system. Is there evidence that they could somehow protect us against microplastics? Not in humans. Not that it's been proven yet, but still a good idea to eat them anyway. So given that we don't have all of this concrete evidence of the harms that microplastics may or may not be doing to our bodies...

Do you think we should be changing our habits? I think there's a really good reason to change our habits and that's the environment. I think there's no doubt that we do need to cut down on the amount of plastic that we use, that we throw away. I think there's clearly that it's getting into marine life. And for all these reasons, I think all scientists agree that actually we need to be thinking much more carefully about the plastic we use.

It might be that as more and more research comes on board that we do find that these tiny, tiny, tiny bits of plastic do not agree with our body. And our bodies are quite good at fighting stuff that don't agree with it. But, you know, there is the chance that it could harm us. So I think it's about being conscious of

being cautious and thinking, well, we might as well do something good for the environment, but let's not panic too much because the evidence isn't there yet. It might increase over the next few years, but we just don't know. And I don't think we should all live under a cloud of worry about this. Maybe what we could do instead is think about the things that are already proven, like going for a drug or eating healthily and focus on that while

being mindful that plastic isn't brilliant for the environment anyway. Smitha, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and for explaining all of that and cutting through some of the noise and some of the things that we see popping up on our TikTok feeds. No problem.

So just to summarise, there is plenty of research showing how microplastics enter the human body and they found traces of them in our blood, our brains and our lungs. But we don't yet know what harm they could cause. There's limited research and a lot of the evidence comes from animal studies. So what's being done to tackle the level of microplastics in our water, our

food, the air, basically every part of our daily lives. Well, countries have been meeting to discuss the root of the problem, plastic production. In December, more than 200 nations met in South Korea for what was meant to be a final round of talks. They were hoping to create a new treaty that would tackle plastic pollution, but some countries blocked it because it could harm their economies.

Those discussions about a potential plastic pollution treaty are due to resume later this year. And that brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Hannah Gelbart. This is What's in the World from the BBC World Service. We'll see you next time.