{
 "edition": "003",
 "date": "2026-07-30",
 "claim": "There is a plastic spoon's worth of microplastic in your brain, and it is causing dementia.",
 "verdict": "Half True",
 "score": 58,
 "components": [
  {
   "name": "Source quality",
   "score": 3,
   "note": "Rubric 0 to 4: peer reviewed in Nature Medicine and open access. The research is not the problem. As with any strong paper misused, the failure is downstream of the source."
  },
  {
   "name": "Sample and method",
   "score": 17,
   "note": "Rubric 15 to 17: the dementia group is twelve brains with no matched control group, compared against pooled cohorts, and the spoon figure is a modeled extrapolation presented in public as a measurement. Both halves of this band apply at once."
  },
  {
   "name": "Independence",
   "score": 3,
   "note": "Rubric 0 to 4: university researchers with no product to sell and no commercial interest in the conclusion. Nothing here is bought."
  },
  {
   "name": "Replication",
   "score": 16,
   "note": "Rubric 15 to 17: the mass concentration has not been independently reproduced, and independent specialists have said publicly that levels this high have not turned up elsewhere using the same techniques. The cross-check inside the paper was run by co-authors using the same method."
  },
  {
   "name": "Drift",
   "score": 19,
   "note": "Rubric 18 to 20: applied to a question the paper never asked. The study measured how much plastic is present. The claim asserts what the plastic is doing, which the authors specifically declined to conclude in the same paragraph that reports the finding."
  }
 ],
 "call": "By January 31, 2027, no laboratory unaffiliated with the original authors will have published a peer-reviewed mass concentration of microplastic in human brain tissue within an order of magnitude of the 4,917 micrograms per gram reported here.",
 "resolves": "January 2027",
 "resolution_criteria": "Resolves HELD if no such peer-reviewed figure from an unaffiliated group exists by January 31, 2027. Resolves MISSED if one is published, whatever it shows, since the point of the call is whether anyone else can measure this at all. Reports of presence without a mass concentration do not count either way. Resolves VOID if the original paper is retracted, which would make the comparison meaningless.",
 "source": {
  "title": "Bioaccumulation of microplastics in decedent human brains",
  "publisher": "Nature Medicine",
  "date": "February 3, 2025",
  "url": "https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03453-1"
 },
 "scored_by": "Mark Lynd",
 "url": "https://thehypeindex.com/edition/003-plastic-spoon-in-your-brain-dementia/",
 "method": "https://thehypeindex.com/method/",
 "rubric_version": "v1.0",
 "rubric_effective": "July 26, 2026",
 "corrections": [],
 "words": 905,
 "reading_minutes": 4,
 "published_web": "2026-07-26",
 "emailed": "2026-07-30"
}