Exploring the potential link between microplastics and Alzheimer’s disease
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It's all over the news these days: Microplastics are everywhere, even in breast milk. They are a global environmental and health concern, for a number of reasons.
Diego Mastroeni, an associate research professor at the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University, is asking a fresh question: can micro- or nanoplastics play a role in brain health? And can exposure to these plastics increases one’s risk for neurodegenerative diseases?
The project, titled “Quantifying Micro- and Nanoplastics in the Aging Brain: Associations with Alzheimer’s Disease Pathology and Socioeconomic Disadvantage,” is a collaborative effort between ASU, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Banner Sun Health Research Institute, Shaw Institute, Rush University Medical Center and the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute.
The collaborative recently received a $60,000 competitive grant from the Arizona Alzheimer’s Consortium to explore whether microplastics might influence the brain changes associated with Alzheimer’s.
In the below Q&A, Mastroeni provides some background and discusses anticipated future work on this research.
Note: Answers may have been edited for length and/or clarity.
Question: Your study is at the leading edge of investigating whether micro- and nanoplastics accumulate in the human brain. What inspired this direction, and why do you think it hasn’t been explored more deeply until now?
Answer: It’s a lot of arm waving and speculation, a lot of people saying they find this and they find that, but the reality is because the signatures are so similar (to molecules), most studies have relied on a single method and haven’t validated their findings.
We're on the precipice of a revolution in terms of plastic exposure. Over the last five or six years we started to see micro- and nanoplastics trying to kind of creep into our human world and slowly infiltrate our environment. There's nothing standardized in this field, because it's so new. We're taking a real orthogonal approach, with many variables and analytical techniques, by examining brain microplastics through six different methods. (This work is) not only a novelty in looking at disease association but really trying to figure out a gold standard for microplastic analysis in human tissues, which hasn’t been a thing.
Q: You're working with brain and spinal fluid samples coming from thoroughly documented sources. Can you talk about the kind of data you’re collecting and what you’re hoping to learn from it?
A: Basically, one method will validate the other. What we're doing is being really stringent on making sure that we have the appropriate controls, so we can confidently say, here’s how much plastics we find across various samples. Maybe we end up with net zero, but that's important to know, too. We can kind of get a snapshot of how the brain is via the cerebrospinal fluid.
Since these samples are all matched, we’ll be able to determine whether finding plastic in the brain corresponds to finding the same plastic in the cerebrospinal fluid. We'll be able to say, if we find X in the brain, do we find the same X in the central nerve or in the cerebral spinal fluid? No one's going to let us cut open their brain to see if we can pull out a piece of plastic, so this approach provides a valuable indirect method for future analysis in the living.
Q: The correlation between socioeconomic status and Alzheimer’s disease is another aspect of this paper. How are you integrating socioeconomic data into this research, and why is that connection between environment and health disparities so important to this study?
A: The environment outside of our bodies is just as important as the environment inside of our bodies. So when people think about environmental exposure, we also must consider how external factors interact with our internal cellular environment.
Now, one of the incredible things is that the environment has an uncanny ability to determine which genes are going to be turned on and turned off — activated or silenced. For example, exposure to certain environmental toxins, such as pesticides, can interfere with normal gene regulation and prevent critical biological pathways from functioning as they should.
The cool thing is that we have, from our brain and body donation program at Banner, people who donated their brains in the 1980s, as well as people that passed away recently. If they passed away in the 80s, they were alive in the 40s, 50s and 60s — decades before many modern plastics were introduced. This allows us to ask very important questions about the type of plastics present in the brain, since many materials available today simply didn’t exist back then.
Q: What makes now the right moment for this conversation, both scientifically and socially?
A: There are now a lot of papers are coming out on this topic, and we want to set the gold standard. I think that having a gold standard is critical, just so we start on the right foot here. I don't want to be putting work out there where what you're doing is not moving the field forward, you're actually holding the field back. By taking the time to do things right, validating your approaches, setting the gold standard, although it's not the most fun part of biology, it's the most fair and righteous thing to do as a biologist.
We’re living in a time when it’s generally acceptable to talk about almost anything. Everything feels like an open book, and people have the freedom to explore and discover whatever interests them. If something turns out not to be right, that’s fine. We learn from it, we move on and we go forward. I think that there is no loss here, it's only progress. There's a lot of really cool questions I think this preliminary grant will answer, and I am so grateful for that opportunity.
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