The article states that cancerous areas had ~2.5x more microplastics than the surrounding non-cancerous areas. It could be a chicken and egg/correlation≠causation situation, (is cancer caused by microplastics, or do cancerous cells attract microplastics?) but the article does outline that cancer cells clearly had more microplastics.
It should still be compared to differences in other resources being transported to the tissue, see my answer below. I am not a fan of microplastics, I don’t try to discredit their health effects. It is just that this much information does not help much. I understand that causation would be much harder to prove, but at least one should try to prove for insrance that ratio of cancerous to healthy tissue microplastics is much higher than say the same ratio other for other stuff that tissues generally transport by blood vessels etc.
Potentially, as cancer cells don’t switch off and die the same way, they have a longer lifespan to accumulate microplastics. Especially if the body’s disposal of dead cells actually manages to clear at least some of the microplastics from the body.
My complaint was more about the baity title. Nevertheless cancer tissues generate more blood vessels around them to transport more resources to the tissue. A better metric would likely be something that normalizes the amount of microplastics by inflow of total particles. Even other tissue resource densities might serve the purpose. But anything else is either bad science communication or bad science.
It’s definitely not establishing causation, I agree. But showing a correlation isn’t bad science. It could just be that because tumors are more resource intensive they accumulate more plastics. But at the very least they should have identified the specific plastics they found.
%90 of human tissues probably contain microplastics. title sounds like baity. Is it significantly less or more than other tissues is the question.
The article states that cancerous areas had ~2.5x more microplastics than the surrounding non-cancerous areas. It could be a chicken and egg/correlation≠causation situation, (is cancer caused by microplastics, or do cancerous cells attract microplastics?) but the article does outline that cancer cells clearly had more microplastics.
Cancerous tumors tend to siphon more resources than healthy cells. It’s not surprising that they’d have a higher concentration of microplastics
It should still be compared to differences in other resources being transported to the tissue, see my answer below. I am not a fan of microplastics, I don’t try to discredit their health effects. It is just that this much information does not help much. I understand that causation would be much harder to prove, but at least one should try to prove for insrance that ratio of cancerous to healthy tissue microplastics is much higher than say the same ratio other for other stuff that tissues generally transport by blood vessels etc.
Potentially, as cancer cells don’t switch off and die the same way, they have a longer lifespan to accumulate microplastics. Especially if the body’s disposal of dead cells actually manages to clear at least some of the microplastics from the body.
It’s about 2.5x more than the surrounding non-cancerous prostate tissue.
My complaint was more about the baity title. Nevertheless cancer tissues generate more blood vessels around them to transport more resources to the tissue. A better metric would likely be something that normalizes the amount of microplastics by inflow of total particles. Even other tissue resource densities might serve the purpose. But anything else is either bad science communication or bad science.
It’s definitely not establishing causation, I agree. But showing a correlation isn’t bad science. It could just be that because tumors are more resource intensive they accumulate more plastics. But at the very least they should have identified the specific plastics they found.