We’re being warned about them from all sides – but there’s apparently nothing we can do to avoid them. Much less, rid ourselves of the deposits already in our systems. Now real consequences of microplastic pollution are rearing their clinical heads…
One of the biggest problems with microplastics is, you can’t see them coming. They are too small to be discerned with the naked eye. But they are alleged to have major health consequences – though we simply don’t know that much on that account, yet. They’ve been found in every organ of the body. Even the brain. But the affects they may have down the road remain largely unknown.
Fundamental issue
The latest – and one of the first – firm associations between microplastics and disease has just surfaced.
If you follow the unfolding microplastics saga, you may recall a 2024 study that found that micro-plastics had made their way into arterial plaques, which are fatty deposits inside people’s blood vessels. Which restrict blood flow and can trigger high blood pressure, no to mention starving body parts of oxygen. When that part is the brain, we call it a stroke. When it’s the heart, we call it a ‘cor-onary emergency’, or heart attack..
The same 2024 study revealed that patients whose arterial plaques contained microplastic particles were more likely to suffer heart attacks or strokes, or to die from other causes, in the following years than people without plastic detected in their plaques.
The collaborators on a new study were members of the team on the 2024 study. The pair, both cardi-ologists, wanted to look deeper into the association between the heart and micro-plastic pollution. Their follow-up study, published in the European Heart Journal, produced cold, hard numbers on the issue.
What they did
For the new work, they and their colleagues sampled blood from 61 patients. Some were receiving emergency treatment for a heart attack with arterial blockage. Some had chronic coronary synd-romes. Some had normal coronary arteries.
What they found
They came up with some persuasive figures:
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- Some 84 percent of the people who had a heart attack had microplastics in their blood, com-pared with…
- Only 40 percent of people with less severe heart disease, and…
- A mere 32 percent of control patients with normal arteries.
… Which provide further, hard evidence that heart-disease risk may be linked to plastic exposure.
The takeaway
“It has become increasingly clear that where and how people live – the pollutants they are exposed to – leaves a real mark on the heart. And we wanted to understand that better rather than treat it as background noise,” wrote two co-lead authors of the new study, Dr. Emanuele Barbato of the Sant’Andrea University Hospital in Rome, and Dr. Pasquale Paolisso at Sapienza University of Rome.
My take
It’s clear that there is much more work to be done along the lines Barbat0 and Paolisso suggest. And I suspect there are even more-unsettling findings to come…
~ Maggie J.