CIVE research helps confirm presence of plastics in human tissue

Wednesday, March 5, 2025

Media Contact: Tanner Holubar | Communications Specialist | 405-744-2065 | tanner.holubar@okstate.edu

For more than 60 years, plastic production has steadily increased to the point where it has become one of the most widely used synthetic materials on Earth.  

There is so much plastic in the world that studies have now confirmed the presence of nanoplastics in human tissue samples.  

Researchers from Oklahoma State University’s College of Engineering, Architecture and Technology participated in a research endeavor to study human tissue and confirm the presence of plastics in the samples led by the University of New Mexico.

OSU collaborated with the University of New Mexico, Duke University and the Universidad de Valle in Colombia, on publishing on Feb. 3 the study in one of the most prestigious scientific journals, Nature Medicine.  

Dr. Jorge Gonzalez Estrella, assistant professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Justin Scott, a postdoctoral researcher with CIVE, studied tissue samples from UNM using pyrolyisis-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (py-GC/MS). This method allowed them to study a material’s chemical compound and confirm the presence of nanoplastics in the brain, kidney and liver tissues.  

They studied samples of patients provided by UNM who had been autopsied from 2016-24.  

Gonzalez Estrella and Scott have worked on similar research in the past identifying nanoplastics in materials such as soil, biosolids and wastewater, and studied nanoplastics in tissue samples previously. The two of them published a paper in February 2024 in Toxicological Sciences on detecting plastics in placenta tissues in collaboration with the University of New Mexico.   

“What really motivated us to do this is the fact that this cohort of researchers is driven by not only trying to find accumulations on plastics but also mechanisms on how the plastic gets into tissue,” Scott said. “We are basically doing a project in which we’re trying to find exposure of routes, accumulation routes and the toxicity studies into what happens to them in the environment.” 

Their approach using py-GC/MS can identify 12 different polymers. They use what they refer to as a surrogate method in which they remove organic material, use a dye called Nile Red on the material and use a fluorescent microscope to identify the particles, which can be confirmed as plastic under this light.   

"In instances where there’s a sample that needs to be studied, it gives you kind of a spectrum of what’s happening in certain samples,” Scott said.  

OSU researchers studied five brain samples from people who had dementia and confirmed the presence of plastics. They were able to reaffirm what their colleagues at UNM had found, including the fact that brain samples from people who had dementia had a higher concentration of plastic than other types of tissue.   

Older samples had less plastic than newer ones, suggesting a steady increase over time.   

Gonzalez Estrella said more research is needed to better understand how exactly plastic gets into the body. He said there are many everyday situations where plastic could be consumed, and it is unknown exactly what leads to plastic consumption.   

“There’s a lot of things that we consume that come in plastic food packages,” Gonzalez Estrella said. “A lot of food is covered in plastic covers or rubber. The important thing to understand is that new materials on the market aren’t necessarily going to be the source of that plastic because it is quite contained. It’s brand new and has all the plasticizers. But once you start using that plastic is exposed to the environment (for example, solar radiation) or reusing a plastic after its structure has been compromised, it can become brittle and then starts to release smaller particles and so on. That’s one of the things that can increase plastic consumption.”  

Gonzalez Estrella was proud to utilize OSU’s expertise in py-GC/MS to further confirm the presence of nanoplastics. UNM has used visual microscopy to identify larger plastic particles in organs, but this method excludes nanoplastics. Being able to use py-GC/MS to confirm the presence of smaller plastic particles in tissues gave the research a more cumulative result.   

“We were seeing the same thing instead of us being one lab that sees the same trend as another lab,” Gonzalez Estrella said. “But it further validated it through different ways to study the same thing. The nature of this type of approach is to make sure that you are getting similar results through different means.”  

He said the lab is advancing its capabilities to be able to further identify potential problems of nanoplastics in the body. One of the next big pushes will be developing more sensitive techniques that can provide more definitive results.   

For more information on Gonzalez Estrella’s research, click here.