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Dose Dependent Effects of Two Polymeric Materials and Similarities with Certain Drugs
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Zebrafish exposed repeatedly to polyethylene microplastics showed dose-dependent anxiogenic (anxiety-like) behaviour, while polypropylene microplastics produced the opposite, anxiolytic effect, with both polymers altering swimming performance over 120 hours. The contrasting neurobehavioural responses to different polymer types suggest that lumping all microplastics together in toxicity assessments may obscure important differences in their effects on the nervous system.
Polymeric materials became of crucial interest in the research area over the recent years due to worldwide production increase of these materials not always being followed by knowledge of their possible detrimental effects. Therefore, in the present study we analyzed the different effects of polymeric materials at various exposure times. Our results focused on some general effects in terms of anxiety and swimming performance over 120h of exposure and multiple repeated doses of both Polyethylene and Polypropylene microplastics. Polyethylene showed an anxiogenic potential, while Polypropylene exhibited an anxiolytic potential at the first two doses. In terms of swimming performance, an increase of specific parameters was observed throughout the repeated doses in the case of Polyethylene, whereas in the case of Polypropylene they decrease. These results were compared with those from the specialized existing literature on the effects of some of the most common hallucinogenic and psychoactive substances. Our results highlight that the mechanism of action of the aforementioned materials is different and show toxic effects from the first dose. Polyethylene has a similar outcome to the one in the case of some substances, especially hallucinogenic, such as LSD, mescaline, MDMA, phencyclidine, and nicotine. On the other hand, polypropylene has a similar effect to psychoactive drugs, cannabidiol, tetrahydrocannabinol, but also MDMA at certain doses. Bases on these observations, further studies should be conducted on the similarities of the detrimental effects.
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