by People with microplastics and nanoplastics in the lining of a large blood vessel in their neck may have a higher risk of heart attack, stroke or death, new research suggests.
The findings, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, are the first time scientists have linked these tiny plastic particles, the result of degraded plastic pollution, to cardiovascular disease.
Microplastics are defined as particles smaller than 5 millimeters, while nanoplastics are much smaller – so small they can only be seen with specialized microscopes. In recent years, their ubiquity has become undeniable: they have been found in fresh snowfalls in Antarctica and at the depths of the Marianas Trench, as well as in human blood; breast milk; urine; and placental tissue, lung and liver.
Dr. Raffaele Marfella – a cardiology researcher in the department of advanced medical and surgical sciences of the University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli in Naples, Italy, and the lead author of the new study – said that he and his colleagues started the study to look for a new risk. factors for cardiovascular disease.
They knew about the huge amount of degraded plastic pollution that pollutes the planet and wondered “if plastic, in the form of microplastics or nanoplastics, could also degrade our arteries,” Marfella said in an email. People can inhale and ingest the plastic particles. The plastic can also enter the body through the skin.
To study the effects, they turned to a group of patients already scheduled to undergo surgery for a condition called carotid artery stenosis, in which plaque, or fatty deposits, block normal blood flow. The body’s two carotid arteries supply blood to the brain, face and neck. The researchers looked at plaque removed from 257 patients and tracked the patients’ health for an average of 34 months after surgery.
They found plastic particles – mostly nanoplastics – in the plaque of 150 patients. At follow-up, non-fatal heart attack, non-fatal stroke or death from any cause occurred in 20% of those patients and in 7.5% of patients without detectable plastic particles.
After adjusting for age, sex, body mass index and health conditions such as diabetes and abnormal cholesterol, the patients with detectable levels of plastics had “almost five times greater risk of a cardiovascular event” than those without the other patients had, Marfella said.
Numerous experimental studies on cells and animals have shown that the presence of these plastic particles increases disease. One study published online in February in the Journal of Hazardous Materials found microplastics, for the first time, in human arteries.
Previous studies finding the tiny particles in human tissue were “groundbreaking,” said Dick Vethaak, a biologist and toxicologist at Utrecht University’s Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences and coordinator of the Dutch Consortium on Microplastics and Human Health, but this study is “the first one of his. kind.”
“It’s the first to look at so many donors” and the first to follow patients for years to track their health, said Vethaak, who was not involved in the new study.
However, this type of observational study can only show an association between the plastic particles and heart attack, stroke or death. He cannot show that they caused these cardiovascular events. For that reason, researchers would need to conduct a randomized, controlled trial, but it would be unethical to intentionally expose people to potential toxins.
However, the study provides some clues about the relationship between the presence of micro- and nanoplastics and heart disease, said Dr. Martha Gulati, director of preventive cardiology at the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles.
“We know that cardiovascular disease, especially myocardial infarction, is triggered by an inflammatory response,” Gulati said, using another term for heart attack. Italian researchers measured markers of inflammation in patients and found that these markers increased as the level of plastic in the plaque increased.
Still, “is the inflammation caused by the nanoplastics or something else?” Gulati asked.
As the study was conducted in a very specific group of patients, the results cannot be applied to the wider population. But it could pave the way for future studies.
“This paper may encourage people to figure out if we can measure microplastics and nanoplastics in the general population and then examine who goes on to develop cardiac events,” said Gulati.
Vethaak said similar studies are underway with other types of human tissue.
The researchers also noted that the plaque samples may have been contaminated in the laboratory.
“Future studies using cleanrooms, where there is no plastic except for the material being studied, may confirm our observations,” they wrote in the paper.
“I hope this study, and more work it inspires, helps us address our environment and cardiovascular health because I think this is something that really needs to be discussed,” Gulati said. “It gets very little attention.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
