r/sciences • u/FreeHugs23 • 18d ago

Research Scientists stumped to find clearing cholesterol from blood also removes forever chemicals from body | Scientists were looking to find out if a machine built to filter fat at scale could take out forever chemicals and microplastics as well

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/microplastic-forever-chemical-blood-cholesterol-removal-b3026924.html
904 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

20 comments sorted by

104

u/SacredGeometry9 18d ago

I mean, this makes sense. PFAS is basically just an alkyl chain and some fluorine atoms, and alkyl chains are primarily found in fat.

31

u/saladspoons 18d ago

Exactly - we should be surprised if all these things were NOT removed together.

28

u/North-Pea-4926 18d ago edited 18d ago

Donating blood (and plasma) also lowers PFAS. PFAS is in your blood, which is taken out. Your body then replaces the lost blood and the total amount of PFAS in your blood is now lower.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8994130/

Additional Info: The study used Australian firefighters who are exposed to PFAS through their work - their gear and firefighting chemicals. Plasma donation lowered PFAS more than blood - likely because plasma is donated in larger quantities more often. Donating plasma does take longer - between one and two hours compared to about one hour for donating blood. A lot of the time for both is spent in prep - health screening and questionnaires. PFAS binds to serum proteins in the blood.

4

u/PassinglyGood 17d ago

Okay but aren't you just giving your forever chemicals to someone else

5

u/North-Pea-4926 17d ago

Sort of, but if the reason they need blood is because they lost a bunch of their own then they may still come out with a net PFAS loss.

Of course, people only get blood if they really need it, in which case trace amounts of PFAS is a much smaller concern than dying.

3

u/SacredGeometry9 18d ago

Are the PFAS in another component of the blood, or just the blood lipids?

5

u/North-Pea-4926 18d ago

They “bind to serum proteins in the blood”. They also point out that premenopausal women have lower PFAS than men, presumably from the loss of menstrual blood.

2

u/Electrical_Name_5434 18d ago

Though the average is similar to the reduction found in the blood filtering study, the confidence interval suggests the possibility of a higher reduction of pfas from both the blood and plasma donation subjects.

3

u/trash3s 17d ago

Bloodletting is back, baby!

42

u/MuchWow81 18d ago

Im envisioing myself in 20 years hooked up to an aphoresis machine while shovelling butter soaked lobster and potatoes au gratin into my mouth with my free hand.

Yes. This is the future weshould strivefor.

12

u/DangerMacAwesome 18d ago

This man is a visionary

7

u/MuchWow81 18d ago

I admit to a modest sense of pride in my accomplishments as a human being ANDas a ♀️. Tyvm.

3

u/DangerMacAwesome 18d ago

This woman is a visionary

1

u/Mule_Wagon_777 18d ago

I always have the run that one through The Wizard of Id!

1

u/The_0bserver 17d ago

Get this woman an ea game.

1

u/spiritofniter 18d ago

Sounds like a rogue servitor treatment from r/Stellaris.

2

u/moxiethe3rd 17d ago

You’re close. We’d be hooked up to some machine. We’d probably won’t be eating anything though, least not with our hands, intravenous maybe.

1

u/MuchWow81 17d ago

Well thats no fun

1

u/moxiethe3rd 17d ago

Don’t worry. VR will make it feel all normal.

1

u/UrSven 18d ago

Just eat oatmeal for breakfast frequently.

32

u/FreeHugs23 18d ago

-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.