“Horrifying” — Researchers Find Microplastics In Lungs Of Living People By Julia Conley for Natural Blaze
Less than two weeks after scientists discovered microplastics in human blood, a team of researchers in the U.K. said Wednesday that the tiny particles have also been detected in people’s lungs.
Researchers at the University of Hull and Hull York Medical School analyzed lung tissue from 13 people who were undergoing surgery and found microplastics (MPs) in 11 of the samples, including in tissue from the deepest part of the lungs—a discovery that alarmed the authors of the new study.
Read: Microplastics Found in Human Blood for the First Time
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“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 getting this deep into the lungs,” Dr. Laura Sadofsky, lead author of the report published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, said in a statement.
The researchers used a spectroscopy to identify the types of plastic they found. Some of the particles they found were as small as 0.003 millimeters.
The most common microplastic particle found was polypropylene, which is frequently used in plastic packaging, textiles, syringes, and kitchen utensils.
There were 12 different types of microplastics found in the tissue, and male patients had higher levels of the material in their lung tissue. Eleven microplastics were found in the upper parts of the patients’ lungs, seven were found in the tissue from the middle section of the lungs, and 21 were found in the lower part.
The findings “support inhalation as a route of MP exposure,” the authors wrote.
“This is the first robust study to show microplastics in lungs from live people,” Sadofsky told the newspaper. “This data provides an important advance in the field of air pollution, microplastics, and human health.”
Previously, researchers have found microplastics in lung tissue taken only from autopsy samples.
