Plastic microparticles cause brain damage

本站添加: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]Okay, this video is about this paper here that plastic micro particles cause brain damage in mice and there's good reason to believe it's happening in humans, too. The name of the article is microplastics in the blood induce cerebral thrombosis, that's clotting by causing cellular obstruction leading to behavioral abnormality. So, what they did is they cut down to the mouse's brain and they were able to image the micro particles passing through in real time. Okay.

[00:00:29]Um so, here is the mouse's skull. They cut through the mouse's skull. They put like a microscope slide on top of the mouse's brain and they could look directly down upon the vessels in the mouse's brain. And then they had micro particles of plastic that were labeled with a fluorescent uh tag so they could see them with a light microscope. And what they saw was they would pass through these blood vessels. I'll show you some more about it. Nanoparticles, by the way, can get into the um can cross the blood-brain barrier.

[00:01:00]Okay.

[00:01:01]Uh a microparticle of plastic means it's basically about one mi- 1 mm to 1 micron. You know, exactly 5 mm to 1 micron, but just call it 1 mm 1 micron, that'll work. So, a hair, a human hair, is about a tenth of a micron. So, these are much smaller than that quite often.

[00:01:18]A nanoparticle is even smaller. The smallest bacteria, like a mi- like a mitochondria is about 1 micron. So, they're like the size of a mitochondria um or smaller or is a nanoparticle. So, what does a capillary do? A capillary's basically the location in the arterial system of gas exchange. So, the arteries keep narrowing down till they get to the capillary. These are red blood cells.

[00:01:42]The blue circles are oxygen. They slow down in the capillary. The oxygen will pass out and travel to the tissue. Like this is a nerve cell, the axon of a nerve. Okay, this was a capillary drawn below is just showing a thicker wall capillary basement membrane hypertrophied vascular smooth muscle layer in a patient with hypertension and diabetes. But the point of the matter is it's the site of gas exchange. You need these red blood cells traveling through it. Typical red blood cells about 7 microns in diameter. Typical capillary is about 5 microns in diameter.

[00:02:14]Okay, now here's a little bit more of a complex details of a capillary network.

[00:02:19]And this is important to understand that it's usually not just one capillary.

[00:02:24]There's usually a bunch of them next to each other and it's sort of a network that under normal conditions you don't need a lot of blood going to a part of the brain that's not very active. But when this part of the brain becomes more active, these precapillary sphincters, they open up. The muscle relaxes and then more blood can travel through. And that's highly relevant because if you occlude this main thoroughfare thoroughfare pathway, the meta arterial so to speak, the thoroughfare channel, you can open up these precapillary sphincters sideways side pathways to get more blood through there and to save that brain cell. So the brain cells don't just automatically die all at once. I'm going to show you how this main channel's getting plugged up and some of the side channels are getting plugged up. And it becomes a question of dosage. So here's a little more detail.

[00:03:10]They again have cut down to the mouse's brain and they can get microplastics by mouth.

[00:03:16]They can inject them intravenously and they put a little microscope that can detect fluorescence on the mouse's brain. And then here's for uh fluorescence and you can see that they look when they travel through the blood vessel like a little comet.

[00:03:32]They describe it as looking like a lightning bolt.

[00:03:35]The fluorescent labeled microparticle passing through the capillary. Okay, but I'm going to show you where they start running into a problem.

[00:03:44]The immune system has cells that travel in the blood called neutrophils and macrophages and their job is to remove infections, bacteria, or other foreign particles, whatever they might be. So, this immune cell, neutrophil or macrophage, will eat the microparticle.

[00:03:59]Here's a plastic microparticle. And now it's inside the cell, and the cell will increase in size.

[00:04:05]You know, neutrophils and macrophages are already pretty big. Well, you know, I don't remember exactly off the top of my head, but 12, you know, 12 to 15 microns or so, and they're going to swell up to about 20 microns or so. So, now they got to go through this tiny little capillary, 5 micron in diameter.

[00:04:20]It's hard for them to do so. They'll sometimes become stuck. They can deform their body, make themselves more tubular and elongated, but it's hard for them, and they will obstruct the capillary sometime. So, this is showing also that now you get abnormal behavior. When you start plugging up more and more capillaries in the brain of a mouse, its brain doesn't get enough oxygen. This right here is control, the control mouse, how it would investigate an area.

[00:04:44]And when you put the microparticles in, it no longer investigates correctly, okay? And this is showing you other things that mice do. There's a Y maze, an open field maze, hanging from a branch. These are all things mice do, and they do them abnormally when they've been exposed to microparticles. And this is thought to be the mechanism, one of the mechanisms by which plastic microparticles cause brain damage in mice. So, you know, of course I was curious about this, and I have some friends who are pathologists.

[00:05:15]I went and asked them. I go, "Okay." Cuz I also read another article that they found microparticles more in prostate cancer than they did in normal prostate tissue. So, I asked the pathologist, you know, "How often do you see microparticles in tumors?" And the pathologist says to me, "Never." I said, "Never?" I said, "Do you look for them?"

[00:05:35]They go, "No, we never even think of it." So, what I'm saying is a lot of these microparticles are very small, in the range of 1 micron or less, like these nanoparticles. So, they're too small for them to see under routine conditions with a light microscope. Okay? You got a better chance seeing with electron microscope, but electron microscope is not used for routine clinical work. In addition, you know, they might eventually come up with some good stains for humans to look for microparticles. When these guys found them in the research studies, they were specifically extracting the tissue and adding all kinds of things to it to make the microparticles of plastic or nanoparticles of plastic more visible.

[00:06:11]So, I'm giving you the reason why you don't see them more um under normal clinical conditions of looking at tumors. When we do biopsies and certain, you know, I do needle biopsies of tumors all the time and there's excisional biopsies, core biopsies, etc. Um the other thing that I wondered was about in uh brain MRI cuz I look at tons and tons of brain MRI.

[00:06:35]And here, I'll show you what a brain MRI looks like. First of all, here's the basic sequences. I'm not going to give you a whole course in brain MRI, but there's one little thing you need to know.

[00:06:43]Okay, the brain MRI is divided into main categories. There's T1, like the number one, T1. This is T1 weighted. All that means is fluid is dark. What I'm saying to you in MRI language is like the equivalent of animal kingdom, plant kingdom. And then there is T2 weighted.

[00:06:57]All that T2 weighted means is that the fluid is bright. Here's cerebrospinal fluid in the ventricular system of the brain. This is the subarachnoid space around the periphery of the brain. With a unique sequence called a flare, we can suppress the signal of the ventricles, the cerebrospinal fluid, and the subarachnoid space, and it's a great This is the best MRI sequence out of all of them. It's the all If you were stranded on a desert island and you only had one brain MRI sequence, you would want flare.

[00:07:22]Because basically the T2 hyperintense signal of fluid is maintained except for cerebrospinal fluid, and that makes it easier to see lesions next to the ventricles or the cortical sulci because you're not, you know, squinting into the sun, so to speak, because pathology is always going to be bright, okay? Cuz it's got edema with it. Edema means fluid. All right, so now let me show you some regular patients what they look like on brain MRI.

[00:07:46]So, this right here is a a bunch of small strokes in the brain.

[00:07:53]Called the centrum semiovale up high in the brain, but the bottom line is a moderate amount of flare hyperintensities. It's a bunch of small strokes. And I'll often see demented patients that look just like this, and they'll look like this even 3 4 5 years later, but they're becoming more and more demented. However, what I'll see is the brain shrinking. The CSF spaces, the subarachnoid space along the outer surface of the brain, the convexity, keeps enlarging in size where the brain parenchyma itself is shrinking. And that's due to something called apoptosis, programmed cell death, where the brain cells are dying, and the brain just keeps shrinking. Here's a patient with more advanced uh deep white matter strokes, okay? Around the periphery of the brain is the gray matter. That's called the gray matter ribbon. It's tough to see on this flare image. This is the deep white matter in the periventricular region, and it's diffusely hyperintense. So, I would call this extensive, you know, bilateral extensive periventricular flare hyperintensities.

[00:08:46]You know, this is severe small vessel chronic atherosclerotic ischemic disease. So, the bottom line is this is bad. Lots of bright spots, white spots on the flare sequence of the brain. But, I'm also going to tell you most patients I look at demented, they don't even have this much. They have hardly any. Lots and lots of them have none.

[00:09:02]You don't need to have a stroke to have brain damage and be demented. Most patients don't have hardly any or none.

[00:09:08]And the reason is they're primarily dying these brain cells by apoptosis, and they just gradually die due to lack of blood flow, too much stimulants, too much mitochondrial inhibitors, and perhaps too much microplastics. I'm going to bet you this is a previously unrecognized cause of brain damage. I I strongly believe that it is cuz I read a whole bunch of papers suggesting that it is, and it that makes good sense that it is.

[00:09:31]Okay, so let me see if I got a few things left to tell you. Oh, I I I think this is probably my last slide for today. Now, I like this guy Anthony Jay. He wrote that magnificent book called Estrogeneration and he's a lipid biochemist. He doesn't know anything about food, but he makes a couple points. He says if you look at these plastic nanoparticles in the body, microplastics microplastic particles and nanoparticles, he says they're often present in nanogram amounts. And he goes, that's what your normal hormones are present in nanogram amounts. And he said a lot of them contain phthalates or BPA, which are estrogenic types of plastic. And he says there's very good reason to believe that they are exerting estrogenic effects, which could be toxic in all kinds of ways, potentially in a reproductive capacity. Uh he believes they're lowering people's testosterone. He claims that people can increase their testosterone in men as much as 20 or 25% by doing everything they can to avoid microplastics. This is only part one on microplastics. In my follow-up lecture, I'm going to go through all the different ways to to avoid and minimize your exposure to microplastic. But that was a pretty interesting point, that they're present in nanogram amounts, similar to what your normal hormones are. He mentions too, you want to wear natural fibers for clothing. Like your shirt should just be like cotton, for example. Your pants should be like just wool, for example. Your underwear, your t-shirts should be cotton. The reason he says is you don't want these synthetic fibers.

[00:10:55]Like one of the worst is polyester.

[00:10:57]Polyester means polyethylene terephthalate. Phthalate is an estrogenic plastic. It's like clothing made out of plastic. Again, microparticles are typically 1 mm to 1 micron. I know officially they're going to say 5 mm to 1 micron, but in real life, you need a working memory trick that can get you to function equivalently. So, for microparticles, 1 mm to 1 micron is a good way to remember them.

[00:11:20]For nanoparticles, remember 1 micron or less. And the easy way to remember that is with the size of a uh a mitochondrion, okay? So, that's pretty easy to remember, a mitochondrion. And you know mitochondrion are about the size of a small bacteria because theoretically they came from like uh originally something like a bacteria.

[00:11:38]That's a whole other discussion. I made an entire video about that in the past, so we won't go any more on that, but the fact you can increase your testosterone by avoiding them, that's good.

[00:11:48]Okay.

[00:11:49]Uh I think that's about it for today.

[00:11:51]Oh, I got one more thing. Yeah, yeah, one of the very least things you want to do is have reverse osmosis filtration on your water. I made videos on reverse osmosis filters, so I'm not going to go in any more detail, but this will get the fluoride out of your water. It'll get the um it'll get the aluminum out of your water. It'll get the plastic microparticles out of your water. This is what you want, okay? Um so, we'll talk about all this stuff more in a future lecture, but this is just my sort of part one introduction to microplastics. I hope you found it helpful.