(This is an excerpt of the Health Rounds newsletter, where we present latest medical studies on Tuesdays and Thursdays.)
By Nancy Lapid
(Reuters) – The tiny bits of plastic pollution that make their way from the environment into our bodies accumulate at much higher concentrations in the human brain than in other organs, a new study shows.
Researchers analyzed concentrations of microplastics in 91 brain tissue samples collected during autopsies in 2016 and 2024. The samples were from the frontal cortex, the brain region above and behind the eyes involved in cognitive and behavioral functions.
Microplastic concentrations were up to 30 times greater in brains than in livers or kidneys, the research team reported in Nature Medicine.
Concentrations in brains were comparable to those shown in previous analyses of plaque lining the arteries carrying blood to the brain.
Brain tissue from people who had been diagnosed with dementia had up to 10 times as much plastic as brains from everyone else. The study did not answer whether higher levels of plastic in the brain caused the dementia symptoms.
“We just don’t know” how the plastic particles affect the brain, study leader Matthew Campen of the University of New Mexico College of Pharmacy said in a statement.
They might be obstructing blood flow in capillaries, or interfering with connections between nerve fibers in the brain, or somehow attracting the proteins involved in development of dementia, the researchers said.
Microplastic accumulations in the brain and in the liver appear to be growing over time, the researchers also found.
In brains, plastic concentrations increased 50% over the eight-year study period, in concert with an increase in plastic waste on the planet, Campen noted.
Campen said that while consumers often shrug when warned about environmental contaminants, the new findings should trigger alarm.
“I have yet to encounter a single human being who says, ‘There’s a bunch of plastic in my brain, and I’m totally cool with that.'”
Diabetes drug may prevent chemo-related heart failure
Treatment with a popular class of diabetes drugs may help prevent the heart damage that often results from cancer chemotherapy, animal experiments suggest.
Roughly one in 20 cancer patients receiving drugs known as anthracyclines develops heart failure, researchers noted in JACC CardioOncology.
In pigs receiving anthracyclines, the researchers administered a 20 mg daily dose of the SGLT2 inhibitor empagliflozin, sold as Jardiance by Boehringer Ingelheim.
Empagliflozin increases the heart muscle’s consumption of an energy source known as ketone bodies, thereby preserving the heart’s metabolism, or its ability to fuel itself and produce energy. The energy production in turn preserves the heart’s ability to contract and pump blood, the researchers noted.
“Our study demonstrates that empagliflozin prevents structural alterations in cardiomyocytes,” or heart muscle cells, such as atrophy and DNA damage, study leader Danielle Medina-Hernández of Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares in Madrid, said in a statement.
“These results underline the potential of SGLT2 inhibitors not only in the treatment of heart failure, but also as a preventive therapy in cancer patients receiving treatments associated with severe cardiovascular side effects,” Medina-Hernández added.
(Reporting by Nancy Lapid; editing by Will Dunham)
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