No “Normal” Embryos? You May Still Have Choices

The plastic detox on Netflix was an interesting series of a few cases of people who tried to detox themselves from plastics for a period of time, and luckily three of them did achieve a pregnancy.

But we have to remember that this is not a true clinical trial.

It's not even a true cohort or case report, I mean, case control kind of study.

And so it's not really a formal evaluation of the effect of these plastics on fertility.

Now, some of these studies have been done.

It's actually kind of thought-provoking evidence that there are microplastics found in all of our organ systems and testes and semen and endometrium and ovaries and follicular fluid.

There were some recent studies which actually showed microplastics in follicular fluid.

And that is interesting.

About 20 years ago, somebody did a study seeing how much microplastics were in placentas.

And only a small percentage actually had microplastics in placental tissue.

A more recent study found 100% of the placentas they tested had evidence of microplastics.

What we don't know is what the actual effect on fertility or any other systems might actually be.

There are some provocative animal studies that have suggested that such a relationship.

But in humans, they're really very few.

Even some of the studies that showed the evidence of microplastics and follicular fluid were unable to show any effect on ovarian reserve or AMH levels, some fairly significant effects on the FSH levels.

But in general, the evidence, the hard evidence for effects on fertility in humans is really non-existent, so no effect really on fertilization rates, on embryo quality, obviously even on those people who are doing it on aneuploidy, so we just don't have a lot of evidence.

We have evidence in mice.

We know that the microplastics are there in the BPAs and and all that.

I don't think it hurts to try to reduce our exposure to them, but we just don't know that that's going to be the thing that saves your fertility.

It may hurt.

It certainly may hurt your pocketbook if we go after another fashion of the moment and develop those gigantic theories that something is good or bad simply based on completely unvalidated associations or observations.

I couldn't agree more with what you just said.

It's just another manifestation of a bigger problem that we have.

We have too much information.

And a majority of that information is garbage.