Posted on 03/09/2024 4:40:34 PM PST by ConservativeMind
We breathe, eat and drink tiny particles of plastic. But are these minuscule specks in the body harmless, dangerous or somewhere in between?
A small study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine raises more questions than it answers about how these bits—microplastics and the smaller nanoplastics—might affect the heart.
The study involved 257 people who had surgery to clear blocked blood vessels in their necks. Italian researchers analyzed the fatty buildup that the surgeons removed from the carotid arteries, which supply blood and oxygen to the brain.
Using two methods, they found evidence of plastics—mostly invisible nanoplastics—in the artery plaque of 150 patients and no evidence of plastics in 107 patients.
They followed these people for three years. During that time, 30 or 20% of those with plastics had a heart attack, stroke or died from any cause, compared to eight or about 8% of those with no evidence of plastics.
The researchers also found more evidence of inflammation in the people with the plastic bits in their blood vessels. Inflammation is the body's response to injury and is thought to raise the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
(Excerpt) Read more at medicalxpress.com ...
Water filtration, using metal or glass for food and drinking purposes, and even staying away from non-paper tea bags. Believe it, or not, a study found in excess of 13 BILLION nano and micro plastics in just one cup of brewed tea from a common retail tea that uses those fancy plastic webbing bags.
We are going to stop getting those teas, and maybe carefully cut the bags of what we have and dump them into one of our infusers.
Something of note: A prior study also showed that antioxidants expected to be in tea were greatly minimized when tea was brewed with a plastic bet teabag.
My guess, now, is that the plastic acquired the antioxidants for its use, with the antioxidants simply going where they were needed, and plastics do need a form of antioxidants to prevent breaking down.
I smell trillions in retroactive lawsuits for something that may or may not even be true. look what the liars...oops, I meant lawyers did with the most innocuous and ubiquitous substance on planet earth...carbon.
Plastics are carbon based, people are carbon based.
Correlation is not causation.
1950 cvd death rate 588
2019 161
No doubt mostly smoking, but there’s a lot more plastic around now than there was then
A Chinese girlfriend said they put floor sweeping in teabags.
Those thousands of miles of ocean plastic islands are exactly what’s floating through you veins.
RESULTS A total of 304 patients were enrolled in the study, and 257 completed a mean (±SD) follow-up of 33.7±6.9 months. Polyethylene was detected in carotid artery plaque of 150 patients (58.4%), with a mean level of 21.7±24.5 μg per milligram of plaque; 31 patients (12.1%) also had measurable amounts of polyvinyl chloride, with a mean level of 5.2±2.4 μg per milligram of plaque. Electron microscopy revealed visible, jagged-edged foreign particles among plaque macrophages and scattered in the external debris. Radiographic examination showed that some of these particles included chlorine. Patients in whom MNPs were detected within the atheroma were at higher risk for a primary end-point event than those in whom these substances were not detected (hazard ratio, 4.53; 95% confidence interval, 2.00 to 10.27; P<0.001).The study suggests that government provided municipal drinking water is one very large suspect, but don't go pointing fingers: Italy is a large consumer of domestically caught fish in waters teeming with microplastics from treated sewage water releases from all countries bordering the Med... /s
Seriously, though, despite the rather pathetic study (they concede in the paper that their samples may have been contaminated in the lab), this is evidence of a biological reaction to microplastics and more (read 'professional') research is needed.
Irony (seen just now):
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