• mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 month ago

    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.

    • MasterNerd@lemmy.zip
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      1 month ago

      Cancerous tumors tend to siphon more resources than healthy cells. It’s not surprising that they’d have a higher concentration of microplastics

    • Avicenna@programming.dev
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      30 days ago

      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.

      • MajorasTerribleFate@lemmy.zip
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        30 days ago

        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.