Microplastics are ubiquitous: they now pollute both the environment than the human body. After being detected in human blood samplesin March, this time, it was in the bottom of the lungs of living people that microplastics were found.
Previous studies have found microplastics in lung tissue taken during autopsies. But this time, it was on living people that the discovery was made, reports The Guardian. A team of English researchers took samples of lung tissue from thirteen patients undergoing surgery. Microplastics were found in eleven of these patients.
The study analyzed particles up to 0.003mm in size and used spectroscopy to identify the type of plastic. She also used control samples to account for the level of background contamination. The most common particles were polypropylene, which is found in plastic packaging, and PET, which is used in plastic bottles.
“We did not expect to find the greatest number of particles in the lower regions of the lungs, nor particles the size of those we found“, notes Laura Sadofsky, doctor at the medical school of Hull York, in the United Kingdom, and principal author of the study.“This is surprising because the airways are smaller in the lower parts of the lungs and we would have expected particles of these sizes to be filtered out or trapped before reaching this depth,” she explained.
An unknown impact on health
“These data are an important advance in the field of air pollution, microplastics and human health.“, added the researcher. The discovery of the researchers could indeed make it possible to determine the impacts of microplastics on health by making it possible to create realistic conditions for experiments in the laboratory. It was until now difficult to assess the impact of the presence of these microplastics on health, even if researchers had already shown that microplastics damaged human cells in the laboratory.