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The discovery of plastic in arterial plaques marks a significant milestone in the understanding of how pollutants are affecting human health. Researchers found microplastics—tiny plastic particles less than 5 millimeters in size—embedded in more than half of the arterial plaques they examined. These particles, which can originate from a variety of sources including household plastics, packaging, and industrial waste, are now being implicated in the development and progression of heart disease.
The presence of plastic in arteries raises serious concerns about the long-term impacts of environmental pollution on human health. Microplastics have been found in various organs and tissues throughout the body, from the lungs to the liver, but their presence in the cardiovascular system was not fully understood until now.
Wondering if this is gonna wind up like cigarettes where we can’t actually prove they cause cancer because we’d have to create an RCT where we randomly assign nonsmokers to begin smoking to prove that it’s not some other comorbidity or unrelated risk factor endemic to that population but we can’t because telling people to begin smoking is wildly unethical because while we can’t prove it with 100% scientific certainty we do know it. We can’t put plaques in randomized control groups of people with and without plastics to see if one is worse or forms more easily or dissipates less easily.