Dr. Matthew Campen, a professor at the University of New Mexico College of Pharmacy, has been searching the brains of dead people to find something virtually all of us have polluting inside our skulls: Tiny particles of plastic known as micro and nanoplastics. But despite the ubiquity of microplastics in the human body, they’re not always easy to find.
Microplastics have been found everywhere in the human body, including blood, breast milk, testicles, heart tissue, lung tissue and various other organs. So it’s not entirely a surprise that these “shard-like fragments” have made their way into our brains as well. But the authors of a recent study in the journal Nature Medicine are the first to actually visualize these particles, as well as help document their cumulative effect on human health. A big issue is that the amount of plastics in our brains seems to be growing.
