<story><title>Micro- and nanoplastics breach the blood–brain barrier in mice</title><url>https://www.mdpi.com/2079-4991/13/8/1404</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>user3939382</author><text>I don’t need to wait for the science to know that having plastic in our body and blood is bad for our health.&lt;p&gt;The limited science we do have unsurprisingly indicates that it is.&lt;p&gt;It’s weird to me that a lot of HNers, like I see with western doctors, believe that until something is conclusively proven in peer reviewed research it should be treated as if it doesn’t exist at all. IMHO that’s irrational and robotic, there are such things  as safe assumptions and educated guesses.</text></comment>
<story><title>Micro- and nanoplastics breach the blood–brain barrier in mice</title><url>https://www.mdpi.com/2079-4991/13/8/1404</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>The title seems to not quite match the article, unless I’m missing something. The title suggests that microplastics can reach the brain, which be a shocking result given that microplastics are relatively large (up to 5mm). The study only found that nanoplastics of a certain small size were found:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; In our study we performed short term uptake studies in mice with orally administered polystyrene micro-&amp;#x2F;nanoparticles (9.55 µm, 1.14 µm, 0.293 µm). We show that nanometer sized particles—but not bigger particles—reach the brain within only 2 h after gavage.&lt;p&gt;Still concerning, of course. They didn’t really do any quantification of how much this happened, they just administered rather extreme concentrations of deliberately produced nanoplastic formulas and then later found a couple particles in brain sample images.&lt;p&gt;The images they included (scroll down to Figure 3) are somewhat confusing in that they all have green dots in them, but only some of the dots are labeled nanoplastics. Even the control mouse has a lot of little green dots, but they’re not identified as nanoplastics for reasons I don’t understand. Someone more familiar with the subject matter would have to comment on how reliable this method is. The number of green dots is strikingly large in even the control mouse, so clearly they’re not all nanoplastics.</text></comment>