Microplastics trigger several regulated cell-death pathways at once, and the resulting tissue injury disturbs immune microenvironmental homeostasis in ways that raise cancer susceptibility. The authors note that measured microplastic residue levels in human tissue are rising year on year.
A May 2026 review in Frontiers in Public Health that moves past cataloguing where microplastics end up and instead traces how they kill cells. It treats apoptosis, ferroptosis, pyroptosis and autophagy not as separate endpoints but as an interconnected cascade, and links that cascade to inflammatory signalling, immune dysregulation and cancer susceptibility.
