Question:
Should we be worried about research that shows microplastics were found in testicles?
Answer:
Microplastics are everywhere in the environment and there’s increasing evidence that they’re in our bodies. They have been found in all bodily organs where scientists have looked.
A recent study tested 23 human testes, as well as 47 testes from pet dogs. They found microplastic pollution in every sample. The human testicles had been preserved and so their sperm count could not be measured. However, the sperm count in the dogs’ testes could be assessed and was lower in samples with higher contamination with plastics.
These research findings need verification, and we don’t know the effects that microplastics (and nanoplastics, which are even smaller) have in the body, on men’s health or male fertility.
The science about plastics and human health is lagging behind the (growing) production of plastic and its pollution of the environment. There’s no doubt plastic pollution in the environment is a problem and plastic pollution in our bodies might turn out to be just as big a problem, if not bigger. If testes are polluted by plastic and there is an effect, I expect it would be a bad one.
However, I worry about contamination of biological samples by plastics from the environment (during collection, in the laboratory) as not many studies describe their methods in enough detail to know if their control samples in the experiments are appropriate.
Another consideration is that there are thousands of chemicals in plastics, and we do not know the health effects of most of them. We desperately need more research.
Tim Moss
Healthy Male Health Content Manager
Associate Professor Tim Moss has PhD in physiology and more than 20 years’ experience as a biomedical research scientist. Tim stepped away from his successful academic career at the end of 2019, to apply his skills in turning complicated scientific and medical knowledge into information that all people can use to improve their health and wellbeing. Tim has written for crikey.com and Scientific American’s Observations blog, which is far more interesting than his authorship of over 150 academic publications. He has studied science communication at the Alan Alda Centre for Communicating Science in New York, and at the Department of Biological Engineering Communication Lab at MIT in Boston.
