I just posted the results of a self-experiment that shows, for the first time, that a drug protocol can stimulate microplastics mobilization in a human. For anyone interested, the full write-up with background and details is here:
TL;DR:
When ingested, microplastics are engulfed by cells and delivered to lysosomes, where they sit indefinitely. This causes dysfunction and inflammation, and probably underlies the associations we’ve seen with dementia and cardiovascular events. Getting cells to eject them back into the bloodstream could allow them to be eliminated. Since sulforaphane has been shown to stimulate cells to dump the contents of their lysosomes, I wondered whether it could coax them into dumping microplastics.
I dosed 100 mg of sulforaphane on day 0. This mobilized millions of particles in the 10-70 micron range on day 2, the highest levels ever recorded by the testing company.
I can’t say whether they were ultimately cleared from the body, but it’s possible that this mobilization drove a good fraction of them toward elimination in bile or urine. Alternatively, pushing them outside of cells could enable removal with plasma exchange.
This is the first evidence that microplastics can be actively removed from the body, even once they’ve been engulfed by cells.
That is fascinating … but what if instead having them in the lysosomes, which might be your body’s method of minimizing harm, now that a whole lot has been mobilized and released, they all get lodged in small vessels in your heart, brain and periphery as they are now free in your blood stream?
Given that you are still typing and able to produce this report would indicate nothing bad happened - at least symptomatically.
I don’t know the answer to this but it could go either way or a bunch of other ways.
Great point. I especially wonder about the particles in the brain, which are likely harder to clear. Since some of the larger particles are larger than capillaries, there is definitely the potential to clog things up.
But having them in the lysosomes of your macrophages and endothelial cells is also a very, very bad thing.
The question is, which is worse? I don’t know the answer.
Thanks Steve. Really glad you enjoyed the Substack.
Also, great points. Lower, commonly used doses of sulforaphane (e.g., 10 mg) definitely have biological effects and would likely activate something similar. And since a 10 mg dose has a broad track record in clinical studies and in the real world, I would feel confident in the safety, even without knowing more about what happens to the mobilized particles. I used 100 mg to drive a large effect that I could measure for the study—smaller doses may actually be better therapeutically.
And totally agree on both the need to follow the fate of the mobilized particles and to measure efficacy for decreasing baseline levels. I’m going to reach out to some labs that can run other biological fluids as I look into the next round of experiments.
If sulforaphane always results in such a sharp spike in blood microplastics then you could draw out blood or plasma and throw it away to remove it from the body.
It would be interesting to see the results after this is done multiple times. Is more of it in the blood or plasma?
Very cool. Plasma donation carries the benefit of removing things from the body and is free. Plasma exchange or filtration have their own benefits.
Bryan Johnson did state he didn’t really feel different after removing all of his blood plasma.
I could foresee a therapy where you dose super high levels of sulforaphane and filter or remove your plasma. Or maybe it requires full blood draw. Who knows? I’d want to see both tested. It would be good to see plasma filtration tested as well.
