Makes me genuinely wonder… I’ve donated blood for like 15 times now – does that make my current blood less saturated with microplastics than if I hadn’t?
Probably not. Unless they build up in the body somewhere, the amount of microplastics in your blood is determined by how many you consume via inhaled dust, food, and drink compared with how many you flush put via urine and/or fecal material.
If they do build up in the body somewhere, it probably isn’t the blood, because blood is already filtered regularly.
I was thinking that a kidney dialysis machine might be able to filter out that stuff from your blood. I think the way those work is your blood goes out a tube into the machine and it filters it before sending it back to you. So you’d need filters in there that are fine enough to catch the microplastics.
Correct. If there are actually micro plastics in your blood, the plastic is likely relatively small compared to a blood cell. Otherwise we would be witnessing a lot more issues with stroke/heart attacks. Any kind of filter small enough to filter out something that small would also filter out blood cells.
Makes me genuinely wonder… I’ve donated blood for like 15 times now – does that make my current blood less saturated with microplastics than if I hadn’t?
Probably not. Unless they build up in the body somewhere, the amount of microplastics in your blood is determined by how many you consume via inhaled dust, food, and drink compared with how many you flush put via urine and/or fecal material.
If they do build up in the body somewhere, it probably isn’t the blood, because blood is already filtered regularly.
I was thinking that a kidney dialysis machine might be able to filter out that stuff from your blood. I think the way those work is your blood goes out a tube into the machine and it filters it before sending it back to you. So you’d need filters in there that are fine enough to catch the microplastics.
I don’t think any filtering happens in dialysis, unwanted stuff just diffuses to another solution
Correct. If there are actually micro plastics in your blood, the plastic is likely relatively small compared to a blood cell. Otherwise we would be witnessing a lot more issues with stroke/heart attacks. Any kind of filter small enough to filter out something that small would also filter out blood cells.
I’ve read that’s true for PFAS… It depends on where the microplastics are stored by your body