Decades of plastic merchandise disintegrating in our environment have left our planet – and much of our bodies – coated in a fine dust of synthetic polymers.
The impacts of invasive micro and nanoplastic (MNP) particles are slowly coming to light as researchers gradually tease out links between their presence in our tissues and adverse health conditions.
In 2024, researchers found that patients with MNPs in their arterial plaque were at higher risk of myocardial infarction, stroke, or death from any cause within the next few years.
A study led by researchers at the Sant’Andrea University Hospital and the University of Campania in Italy builds on previous findings, discovering that patients who had a serious heart attack also had higher levels of MNPs than healthy volunteers and those with chronic ischemic heart disease.
“These findings do not prove that microplastics cause heart attacks, but they reveal a strong association between environmental exposures, microplastics in the blood, and cardiovascular disease,” says lead author Emanuele Barbato, Director of the Cardiology Unit of Sant'Andrea University Hospital.
For more than a century, plastic waste has accumulated in the environment, weathering into fragments too small for the eye to see. It has blown in the wind, sunk into the sediments of the oceans, gathered in the soil, and filtered into our bodies through the air, food, and water we rely upon.
There, it has embedded itself in our lungs. Our brains. Our hearts. Our placentas.
Just what damage it may be causing has been the subject of intense investigation in recent years, as the realization of plastic’s ubiquitous creep has dawned upon us.
In theory, the presence of tiny, foreign particles rubbing against our cells should be grounds for all kinds of inflammatory responses. Worse still, the compounds embedded in the synthetic web of petrochemicals should also interfere with our delicate biochemical processes.
Yet finding clear evidence of the actual harms takes time.
"Until recently, the cardiovascular effects of plastic exposure were largely speculative,” writes a team of experts in an editorial accompanying the recently published study on heart attacks and MNPs.
“However, emerging clinical evidence now suggests a potential link between MNPs and cardiovascular disease.”
The researchers collected samples of blood from arteries around the body in 61 volunteers who were undergoing invasive coronary angiography for suspected coronary artery disease in Sant’Andrea Hospital and the Integrated University Hospital of Verona.
They found MNPs in 84% of patients who had been diagnosed with a heart attack, while in patients with chronic narrowing of the coronary arteries, MNPs were recovered in just 40% of cases. For individuals with healthy arteries, micro and nanoplastics were found in just 32%.
Unsurprisingly, every individual who was either a smoker or a resident of a polluted neighborhood had MNPs in their blood, compared with 12.5% of those who were neither.
While the relationship slowly becomes clear, the precise nature of the connection between plastic particles and cardiovascular disease is yet to be determined. To do that, studies will need to continue to standardize approaches to characterizing nanoparticles and finding methods that can distinguish between the plastic itself and the contaminants that cling to them.
The need for action is pressing. Coronary artery disease is already a leading cause of death around the world. As the dust continues to settle, exposure to plastic micro- and nanoparticles might be a health factor future generations will need to contend with.
This research was published in the European Heart Journal.
Source: University of Campania via Scimex
Fact-checked by Bronwyn Thompson
