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Published on: November 2, 2013
Identification and analysis of microplastics in human penile cancer tissues
Ming Wang1, Qiushi Liu1, Xueping Zhang2
1Department of Urology, the First Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University, Hefei 230022, China.
Background:
Widespread pollution from microplastics (MPs) has been identified as a significant contributor to adverse health effects in humans. This research aimed to investigate the presence of MPs in human penile cancer.
Methods:
The Laser Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (LDIR) was employed to detect and analyze MPs in the cancerous tissue (CT) and adjacent normal tissue (ANT) of 17 patients diagnosed with penile cancer. Subsequently, the abundance, sizes and types of MPs in CT were compared to those in the corresponding ANT.
Results:
Nine types of MPs were identified in 85.3 % of the samples analyzed, with an average abundance of 6.42 particles per gram. The most prevalent types of MPs were polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP), and polyvinyl chloride (PVC), primarily falling within the 20-50 μm size range. MPs exhibited higher abundance and diversity in CT compared to ANT, with comparable size distributions evident in both of two areas.
Conclusion:
Our study firstly confirm the presence of MPs in tissue samples from patients with penile cancer. Additionally, the abundance and variety of MPs in cancerous tissue are significantly higher than in adjacent normal tissue, although they had similar size distributions.
