• moakley@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    What’s the impact exactly?

    They say microplastics are in every organism, everywhere. Seems like a large enough sample size that we should have an idea of what kind of damage they do?

    • Tehdastehdas@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      https://hsc.unm.edu/news/2025/02/hsc-newsroom-post-microplastics-human-brains.html

      … brain tissue from people who had been diagnosed with dementia had up to 10 times as much plastic in their brains as everyone else, Campen said. But while there is a clear correlation, the study design cannot show whether higher levels of plastic in the brain caused the dementia symptoms – they may simply accumulate more due to the disease process itself, he said.

    • ThePunnyMan@lemm.ee
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      1 day ago

      Sample size isn’t the problem. The problem is we don’t have a control group to compare against. Ideally, you’d compare people with micro plastics to people without them, but those people don’t really exist anymore.