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Partial Scoping Review of Microplastic Exposure Publications
Summary
This scoping review maps the growing body of research on human microplastic exposure, covering how plastics enter food, water, and air. It identifies key gaps in the literature and highlights the need for standardized methods to better assess real-world human exposure levels.
BACKGROUND AND AIM: Plastic particles are widely considered microplastics once one dimension of that plastic is 5 millimeters (mm) in length. Microplastics have been discovered to be pervasive throughout multiple environments around the world, including all oceans, many terrestrial environments, in the atmosphere, and in food. This pervasiveness has led to a surge of publications regarding microplastics in the global scientific community in the last decade. Microplastics as a field of study is relatively novel, with little known about the adverse health effects from exposure for humans. This review aims to understand and categorize the current literature. METHODS: To assess the size and scope of the available research, the NCEH/ATSDR Microplastic Work Group (MPG) is conducting a scoping review on literature from 1946-2020 surrounding published microplastic literature. The MPG categorized included abstracts into bins showing the characteristics of microplastics such as: identification, exposure, health effects, and transportation. The full papers of the included abstracts were read and screened with 12 binary questions for inclusion into the final scoping review. RESULTS:The majority of publications included in the study were published after 2015. This poster identifies a portion of the categorized and included papers in the final scoping review. A majority of the screened papers were in the broad environmental category with the second largest category including ad/absorption. CONCLUSIONS:This group of screened papers illustrates the increasing trends in microplastic publications in the last 6 years. The included papers focused on a variety of subjects including plastic concentration in the ocean, human exposure and effects, chemical characteristics and microplastic pollution in a variety of settings. These findings indicate a need to forward the state of the research to better understand microplastics. KEYWORDS: Microplastics, exposure, health effects, systematic scoping review
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