Research Recap with Skye: Microplastics

Welcome to Hacking Your ADHD. I'm your host, William Curb, and I have ADHD. On this podcast, I dig into the tools, tactics, and best practices to help you work with your ADHD brain. Today I'm joined by Skye Waterson for our research recap series. In this series, we take a look at a single research paper and dive into what the paper says, how it was conducted, and try to find any practical takeaways.

In this episode, we're going to be discussing a paper called "Use of Cosmetics in Pregnancy and Neurotoxicity: Can it Increase the Risks of Congenital Enteric Neuropathies?" That's a lot. In this, the authors explore the hypothesis of neurotoxins such as microplastics, parabens, benzophenones, phthalates, and metals that can cross the placental barrier and disrupt the development of the fetal nervous system.

If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at https://HackingYourADHD.com/280

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William Curb: Welcome to Hacking Your ADHD. I'm your host, William Curb, and I have ADHD. On this podcast, I dig into the tools, tactics, and best practices to help you work with your ADHD brain. Today I'm joined by Skye Waterson for our research recap series. In this series, we take a look at a single research paper and dive into what the paper says, how it was conducted, and try to find any practical takeaways.

In this episode, we're going to be discussing a paper called "Use of Cosmetics in Pregnancy and Neurotoxicity: Can it Increase the Risks of Congenital Enteric Neuropathies?" That's a lot. In this, the authors explore the hypothesis of neurotoxins such as microplastics, parabens, benzophenones, phthalates, and metals that can cross the placental barrier and disrupt the development of the fetal nervous system.

Yeah, and this may not seem very ADHD-centric when you hear that we're talking about a lot of things here, but there are some really interesting things we can glean, and there are definitely some connections. Let's get into it—of course, with a little bit of a disclaimer that we're not doctors and we are not complete experts in this field. We will be trying to do our best.

Skye Waterson: No, we are definitely not complete experts. But I will say I am a woman with ADHD who recently had a baby and used cosmetics. So, in this way, it at least was very interesting to read. This conversation is about the idea—and this is a review, not an academic experimental article—but it's a review of research around the idea that having some kind of cosmetics, so makeup, fragrances, etc., is associated with certain endocrine disruptors and other things that can be negative to your baby. It's crossing the placental barrier, basically.

And so what that means is that neurotoxicity can damage the blood-brain barrier, affecting the barrier structure or disrupting its regulatory functions. This is a concern that they've mentioned is not necessarily seen or known to be a concern all the time by people. I will say I have heard of it in general, but I haven't heard of it specifically related to pregnancy. So it was really interesting. They said that it's not limited to pregnancy, but it's just a particular time that's really important both during pregnancy and during any breastfeeding as well. So take us through, Will—why are we talking about this in terms of ADHD?

William Curb: Well, in terms of ADHD, the paper gave phthalates as the primary culprit where we see ADHD symptoms arising. From the review, they found that there is definitely a link between phthalates and ADHD, with higher concentrations of what I have in my notes as DBP—dibutyl phthalates. They find that in school-aged children, and it's correlated with increased inattention and impulsivity. So we are seeing these higher levels of these chemicals in kids that are displaying ADHD symptoms. That's why this paper was relevant here for us.

Skye Waterson: Yeah, 100%. And again, it's just important to note they are saying "ADHD behavioral profile," not "ADHD diagnosis." I feel like I keep having to point that out because when you're not in an academic setting, the focus is always on the official ADHD diagnosis. But it feels, especially in the last couple of years, that has been far less of a part of the conversation. When you're not talking about medication, people are starting to talk about subclinical ADHD and ADHD symptoms far more in research. Have you felt the same way, Will?

William Curb: Yeah, I mean there's definitely been a lot more talk about just that end piece of what symptoms we are seeing. Sometimes that is a valid thing to look at, and sometimes it is something we really want to be cognizant of—that a symptom on its own is not indicative of ADHD because that can be especially tricky in a school setting. One of the important criteria for a diagnosis is that we're seeing this at both home and at school. If we're looking at just a pure school setting, we're not getting a full picture.

Skye Waterson: Yeah. So we're talking symptoms and we're talking association. Again, this is very initial research, but it's still important to bring to your attention because for a lot of people, this is the first time we're hearing about it. So if we go into, "Okay, what are phthalates?"

William Curb: Yeah, so they are found in eyeshadows, fragrances, nail polishes, moisturizers, and hair products, but also in a lot of plastic products to make them softer and stuff.

Skye Waterson: Yeah, exactly. It's a family of chemicals used to soften plastic, so it lives around that zone of plastic. And if you are somebody who is taking in cosmetics in different ways, it can affect thyroid hormone regulation, thyroid receptors, and cause hormone disruption. So there are a lot of different things that it can affect in general.

I think this is where it becomes an interesting conversation because one of the things I saw written down, which I thought was hilarious, was: "Well, you should probably avoid phthalates because it's pretty easy." And it's got a big outcome, so the feeling is, "Okay, we'll just be safe and just don't do it." I will say for reference, I'm pretty "crunchy"—if you know, you know—and I actually do avoid them. But that was a really, really complicated, expensive process that involved a lot of research and a lot of time. So when somebody says, "Oh, just avoid phthalates or other things because of this association," that is very difficult. That is not the easiest thing to do.

William Curb: Yeah, cutting out stuff that is just everywhere in the world is hard. Even if you don't directly get a lot of the stuff, you'll still get some aspects of it in the water supply or dust. This isn't to say that harm reduction isn't great—where you say, "Hey, I'm going to try and reduce this"—but the goal shouldn't be to go to zero because that's not realistic.

Skye Waterson: Yeah, and that's where the whole thing becomes very complicated. I will just say, because we are talking about cosmetics, if you are somebody who wants to reduce your phthalates and other things using cosmetics, I highly recommend Inika (not sponsored). That was what I found after years of research; Inika has really good makeup products that don't have any of this stuff.

William Curb: Yeah. And an interesting thing too, also in this paper, is that they talked quite a bit about microplastics, but not directly in regards to ADHD. Now, microplastics are something that I'm sure everyone listening has heard about because they, again, are everywhere.

It was interesting that they didn't mention them in regards to ADHD because microplastics were mentioned as an endocrine disruptor, and endocrine disruption was also mentioned as something linked with ADHD symptoms. So I was like, "That's interesting that you didn't make this connection there," but it's probably just because it wasn't the focus of the paper.

Skye Waterson: Yeah, the paper's focus was on looking at all the different things that could be associated. ADHD wasn't the only one; there was also weight, autism (ASD), neurocognitive development struggles, Parkinson-like diseases, motor skills, and Alzheimer's. There were a lot of things associated with metals, microplastics, parabens, and phthalates in this conversation. ADHD is just the one that we are focusing on.

It is a very interesting paper. In terms of the outcome, it's really about bringing awareness to the fact that this is something that should be paid attention to, because at the moment, that is not necessarily something that people know—or if they do know, they might not know why, or particularly that this is most important during pregnancy.

William Curb: Yeah, and I think this is also something where there is definitely individual responsibility, but it's also something we want to look into for industry regulations in the future. Like being like, "Hey, yeah, these chemicals and plastics and all this stuff—we need to find ways to not have that everywhere."

Skye Waterson: Yeah, 100%. And this was something else they mentioned—some of these things are banned in certain places but not others. Removing neurotoxic compounds from formulations, particularly of cosmetics, is important given that cosmetics are used a lot by women, and women are the ones who are getting pregnant and having to deal with these situations. When you line up all the associations, it sort of says, "Hey, we should probably not be putting this situation on women." Again, as I said for the last paper, the answer is not to add one more thing to the plate of somebody who is having a baby and taking care of other people. As someone who recently did that, it would be very unhelpful.

William Curb: Absolutely. We want to make everyone's life easier here and we want to have children that... because again, we are seeing ADHD symptoms here. There is a lot going on with endocrine disruption, as you were alluding to with this paper. There is a lot that you can see, and we as a society need to be making changes. This is not simply "Mom needs to be better."

Skye Waterson: Yeah, Mom's doing her best.

William Curb: Yeah. With that said, there are things that you can do to help on an individual level. This paper was specifically looking at the maternal side of things, but there's probably enough evidence to say that even if you're not pregnant, reducing these chemicals in your life would probably be good too.

Skye Waterson: Yeah, 100%. And they did mention that around things like sunscreen and things that have metals in them. One of the things we saw when looking at this research was that people are particularly interested in measuring this in pregnant women because it's the time when these things have the biggest effect, so it's easier to study them, basically.

William Curb: Yeah, and especially when we're looking at phthalates and their effect on neurodevelopment. Absolutely—when you're having the most brain development is when you want to have the least of these.

Skye Waterson: Yeah, exactly. So it's an interesting connection into this idea that maybe there is more to ADHD symptoms than just genetics. I'm curious to keep delving into this because, like I said on a different episode, it's not something that I have personally done a lot of diving into. I think I've been a bit resistant to the idea that this is more than just genetics, but like you said, it could also be about those epigenetic switches.

William Curb: Yeah, and just seeing the magnitude of effect. Because say you are diagnosed with ADHD, but you're also exposed to chemicals that give you more ADHD symptoms—you're going to have more ADHD symptoms in general.

Skye Waterson: Yeah. And this is why I love doing these research recaps. Last time I was on a podcast and they asked me what the reason for ADHD could be, I was like, "Oh, who knows? Genetics, probably." And now—this paper came out pretty recently—we have a little bit more of an understanding potentially of the beginning of an association, at least.