A blood-filtering technique for lowering cholesterol may also remove toxic forever chemicals from the body, a new study suggests.
Apheresis machines are routinely used in hospitals to help patients with hard-to-treat high cholesterol levels.
They work by drawing blood from one arm, separating fat molecules from the plasma, and returning it to the other arm after passing it through a filter.
An apheresis centre at the Technical University of Dresden, Germany, is the largest such facility in the world, performing up to 10,000 such treatments a year.
In the new study, researchers examined discarded apheresis bags to see what the machine’s filter had caught along with fat molecules from the blood.
They were looking to find out if a machine built to filter fat at scale could take out forever chemicals and microplastics as well.
Forever chemicals have been used in non-stick utensil coatings, firefighting foams, and stain-resistant fabrics for decades. Previous studies have found them in the blood of over 90 per cent of people living on the planet, most of them exposed through drinking water.
True to their name, forever chemicals do not get broken down easily, building up within the body and heightening the risk of cancer and hormone problems as well as weakened immunity.
Microplastics, released by the environmental breakdown of plastic, also stay in the body stubbornly, with studies estimating that an average person may be ingesting between 39,000 and 52,000 plastic particles every year.
In the new study, researchers assessed 34 patients immediately before and after two double-filtration plasmapheresis sessions. They found that the higher-risk low-density cholesterol levels of the patients fell after each session. Alongside, they noted, the levels of the forever chemicals perfluorooctanoic acid, perfluorooctane sulfonic acid, perfluorononanoic acid, and perfluorohexane sulfonic acid appeared to drop by up to 25 per cent.
“When we finally asked what else was leaving the circulation, two independent laboratories found the same compounds falling in the plasma,” said Stefan R Bornstein, an author of the study published in the journal Brain Health.
There was no “clean result”, however, to make the case for removing plastic particles from blood using this method, they said.
Scientists also cautioned that the study did not conclusively show, via a controlled clinical trial, that apheresis removed toxic chemicals from the blood.
“Our next step is to expose large animals to microplastics and nanoplastics labelled with radiotracers or iron, image them by PET and MRI, and look again after apheresis,” Dr Borenstein said.
“None of this displaces the first priority, which remains preventing exposure. Cleaning up afterwards is the harder and more expensive way to solve the problem.”
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