STUDY ANALYSIS: Microplastics Disrupt Oxytocin Signalling

But first: you've got microplastics in your penis (assuming you have one, of course)

Well, I thought I was going to talk at length—ahem—about new research that found microplastics in penis tissue, but then I thought it wasn’t really that interesting and certainly shouldn’t be a surprise. Microplastics have been found in pretty much every human tissue already, from the brain to the testicles, so why wouldn’t they be found inside the penis as well?

All of the men in the new study—there were only six of them—had erectile dysfunction, which raises the possibility that microplastics in penile tissue could be directly linked to the condition. It would probably be safe to assume, at this early stage of investigation, that the more microplastics, the more chance of suffering erectile dysfunction. It may also be the case that particular kinds of plastics have worse effects than others. Not all plastics are made equally bad.

The question of how microplastics get into the penis is interesting. Of course, the penis has a blood supply and microplastics travel in the blood, but it’s also possible that microplastics were introduced into the subjects’ penises by medical treatments they’d been having, which included the introduction of an inflatable penis prosthesis to allow artificial erections to take place. It’s also possible that the surgical procedure to remove the tissue for study introduced microplastics into the samples.

But even if the samples used in the study were contaminated by surgical procedures or sample collection, I still think it’s likely that men will have some microplastics in their penile tissue simply because, as I say, it has a blood supply.

Sorry, chaps.

Anyway, on to the real subject of today’s STUDY ANALYSIS. Another microplastic study, but one that shows the potentially dire effects of exposure on behaviour. It’s a mouse study, but it has worrying implications, of course, for humans as well. The study’s online ahead of print, so I can’t get into the nitty-gritty of the methodology, results and discussion of the results, but I can talk about what the abstract says.

The scientists behind this new study fed young mice polystyrene microplastics over a period of ten weeks and noted a significant decrease in concentrations of the so-called “love hormone” oxytocin in their brains. Oxytocin plays an essential role in a wide range of social behaviours, from parental bonding with newborns to friendship and orgasms. Because the mice in the study had less oxytocin, they showed clear “deficits in sociality;” although the abstract doesn’t describe these in any detail.