Year: 2025
Type: other
Abstract: W hen neuropathologist Elaine Bearer first encoun- tered brown deposits in two human cadaver brains from people who had dementia, she could not identify them.None of her conventional stains or other imaging techniques revealed what the glassy blobs might be.A few months later, in May 2024, Bearer, a professor at the University of New Mexico, heard that fellow UNM researcher Matthew Campen was using pyrolysis gas chromatography/mass spectrometry to test for microplastics in brain tissue.Suspecting the presence of plastics in her dementia-affected brains, she sent a sample to his group.The results were striking.The dementia-associated tissue had five times as much microplastics as the nondementiaassociated samples they had been studying.But Bearer still did not know whether her brown lumps were plastics.Other pathologists had been seeing similar deposits in other brains, but no one had yet worked out a way to identify them.Fortunately, innovation in neuroimaging is Bearer's specialty.She and her colleagues got to work trying myriad stains and instruments to identify the brown spots.In fall 2024, they developed a microscopy method that finally confirmed that they were looking at microplastics in brain samples.Now she wants to use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to track microplastics in living brains and help discover whether plastics could be linked to neurodegenerative diseases.Louisa Dalton spoke with Bearer about her quest to help pathologists see microplastics in the brain and the further questions their presence raises.This interview was edited for length and clarity.Is this the first time pathologists have identified these brown deposits in brains as plastics?Yes, this is the first time ever!And I've been a neuropathologist for what, 30 years?And I do not know why I just noticed them for the first time in these brains.I think it is because when they're aggregated, they look like brown deposits under a light microscope, but nothing stains them, and all the individual particles are too small to resolve with a light microscope. CENTER STAGE Louisa DaltonMicroplastics in dementia-affected brains resisted identification until she lit them up.
Source: ACS Central Science
Author: Louisa Dalton
Language: English
Subfield: Pollution
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4410496397