Key points:
- Researchers found that ingested microplastics travel from the gut to tissues in the kidney, liver, and brain.
- These findings indicate that microplastics can cross the intestinal barrier and affect metabolic pathways in other parts of the body.
- In the future, researchers plan to determine how diet is associated with microplastic uptake.
A recent study, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, finds that microplastics have a significant impact on the digestive pathways. These tiny particles travel from the gut to the tissues of the kidney, liver, and brain.
Over a 4-week period, researchers exposed mice to microplastics in their drinking water at a level equivalent to the quantity of microplastics humans are thought to ingest each week. They found that the microplastics migrated out of the gut into the tissues of the liver, kidney, and the brain. Once in the affected tissues, microplastics changed metabolic pathways.
“We could detect microplastics in certain tissues after the exposures,” explained Eliseo Castillo, professor at the University of New Mexico. “That tells us it can cross the intestinal barrier and infiltrate into other tissues. These mice were exposed for four weeks. Now, think about how that equates to humans, if we’re exposed from birth to old age.”
As a next step, the team will investigate the role of diet. They plan to give laboratory animals a high-cholesterol/high-fat diet or a high-fiber diet and then expose them to microplastics to determine if diet affects the uptake of microplastics.
Researchers hope that these studies will reveal the impact of microplastics on human health and inspire changes to how society produces and filtrates plastics.
“The research we are trying to do aims to find out how this is impacting gut health,” said Castillo. “If you don’t have a healthy gut, it affects the liver and so many other tissues.”