Microplastics are showing up everywhere in the human body, but what does this actually mean for our health?
For starters: potentially crumbling our poor skeletons.
New research suggests that the inescapable plastic particles could be weakening our bones by hindering their ability to generate new tissue. This, along with other harmful effects on bone health that the researchers found, could be contributing to a rise in diseases like osteoporosis worldwide.
“The potential impact of microplastics on bones is the subject of scientific studies and isn’t negligible,” Rodrigo Bueno de Oliveira, coauthor of a new study published in the journal Osteoporosis International, said in a statement about the work.
The work is the latest to explore the effects of ubiquitous microplastic pollution on the human body. Though it’s firmly established that microplastics are virtually omnipresent, and have invaded everywhere from our brains to bloodstreams to bodily fluids, how this impacts our wellbeing is unclear. It also pairs uneasily with previous research that found microplastics in our bone marrow.
There was already reason to be concerned about microplastics’ effect on health. Some research has suggested that microplastics could be contributing to rising rates of mental health issues like depression and dementia, with a recent study showing that mice that were deliberately exposed to the particles developed symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.
Other studies have shown that “microplastics impair cell viability, accelerate cell aging, and alter cell differentiation, in addition to promoting inflammation,” said Oliveira, coordinator of the Laboratory for Mineral and Bone Studies in Nephrology at the State University of Campinas in Brazil.
For this latest research, Oliveira’s team pored over more than 60 in vitro and animal studies that explored the effects of microplastics. Armed with all that data, their analysis showed that the particles can promote the formation of cells called osteoclasts, which are responsible for degrading old bone tissue so newer tissue can grow.
Along with other negative effects on cell health the researchers found that microplastics cause — most notably reducing white blood cell counts and disturbing the microorganisms in your gut — this knocks the bone cycle severely out of balance, causing osteoclasts to degrade more tissue than can be regenerated. This can weaken the bones, cause deformities, and even lead to fractures.
It can also, according to the researchers, lead to something even more ominous.
“In this study, the adverse effects observed culminated, worryingly, in the interruption of the animals’ skeletal growth,” Oliveira said.
These bone-weakening symptoms, if the link holds up, make microplastics a risk factor for osteoporosis, a disease that causes your bones to become brittle as they lose density and mass. Osteoporosis-related fractures are increasing worldwide largely due to an aging population, with one in three women and one in five men over the age 50 expected to experience one in their lifetime, according to the International Osteoporosis Foundation. These rates may increase by 32 percent by 2050, estimates show.
Given that microplastics are literally everywhere, it makes sense that it could be a culprit behind the global trend. Next up, Oliveira and his team want to put this connection to the test by exploring how they affect the strength of rodent femurs.
“There’s a gap in our knowledge regarding the influence of microplastics on the development of these diseases,” Oliveira said. “One of our goals is to generate evidence suggesting that microplastics could be a potential controllable environmental cause to explain… the increase in the projected number of bone fractures.”
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