Regular blood donations can reduce “forever chemicals” in the bloodstream: study
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And btw, donating plasma doesn't mean other people will get your PFAS; many things can be done with plasma besides injecting into other people.
Which makes me wonder if women have a specific advantage on this matter. I do remember reading that regular blood donations show health benefits, and that women get them "for free", so to speak. This may be part of the reason.
It's not hard to imagine the human body optimizing for those conditions, which would make permanently holding onto all your blood suboptimal.
In other words, dilution is solution of pollution[0]
There's a really good documentary called Dark Waters about a lawyer for the Chemical industry who switches sides after his home town has a lot of people get sick from Dupont poisoining people and he's been fighting a crusade against them ever since. It stars Anne Hathaway and Mark Ruffalo.
You should in the very least read the summary. Even though the trial referred in the submission tracked regular plasma donations, the reduction of "forever chemicals" was not a function of how regular they were, only the volume of blood/plasma donated by the firefighters.
Also, I'd be surprised if the rate wasn't tied to the initial concentration, which would mean that increased rates lead to diminished returns.
But PFAS testing is not the norm?
Per a Tedx talk on this subject: https://www.nrdc.org/experts/anna-reade/pfas-blood-tests-nee...
>> Unfortunately, a PFAS blood test is not a routine lab test that can be processed by your local lab and covered by your health insurance. In fact, there are only a handful of labs certified to test for PFAS in blood and the out of pocket cost for this test is out of reach for most people.
Humans aren't precise machines, each person has different values and different value ranges for standard measurements - and asymptomatic deviations frequently mean nothing whatsoever. On the other hand investigations can be invasive, painful, risky and expensive.
There's a reason most tests aren't recommended for folks outside certain risk categories (age, family history, etc). And in a litigious society like America, it's not because it's expensive. There's some specific diseases where there's a lot of data backing this thesis - certain cancers for instance.
If these tests aren't run, then I am not sure if it would be "marginally earlier", it might be much later or even never that the problem is discovered.
Ideally, all chemical processes in the body could be known and we could have an almost "mechanical" model of the body. How else but with more testing can be reach that knowledge?
Can you? The problem is the test's sensitivity and specificity, there's not much statistical work to do after the test on a single case. It's not an advanced model deciding whether you're sick or not.
> Ideally, all chemical processes in the body could be known and we could have an almost "mechanical" model of the body. How else but with more testing can be reach that knowledge?
Yeah, ideally we would. Not a doctor, but as far as I can tell, we're a thousand years away from that.
All the risks associated with false positives (other than the side effects of actually drawing blood once a year, which I think is negligible) can be removed by simply not overreacting. Find a cancer? Well, consider not subjecting yourself to chemo just to get rid of it. Some cancers will kill you by winter, some will just stay there until you die of something else. How will we know which is which? By testing lots of people over long periods of time to see what's harmless and what's actually really bad. Or as the previous commenter said: "That's the whole point of establishing a baseline."
A concrete example is the NHS recommends against the PSA prostate cancer antigen screening test completely for everyone of any age because this test does more harm than good. They have a good write-up on why. [2]
Generally I agree this data should be collected, but aggregated and not used for individual treatments.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy
[2] https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/prostate-cancer/psa-testing/
We hardly ever measure the “good” or stable cases so when we start testing stuff when we are ill there is very little data on what is normal or even normal for you.
Ive heard of cars where due to family history someone preemptively screened on certain blood values. When those changed they knew something was up, even though the value was still within normal range it was up 100x for them.
"The Problem With Silicon Valley Medicine": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW3DGnHO2iY
There are studies like the UK biobank that are trying to collect longitudinal information about a huge number of people, but they're volunteers.
https://empowerdxlab.com/products/product/pfas-exposure-test
[0]: https://testdirectory.questdiagnostics.com/test/test-detail/...
Hmm:
> As to the question of what happens to recipients of this blood: “Perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances are ubiquitous, and no threshold has been identified that poses an increased risk to recipients of donated blood components.”
> apart from being identified as potentially carcinogenic, PFAS are associated with “low fetal weight, impaired immune response, thyroid function abnormalities, obesity, increased lipid levels, liver function alterations, and, potentially, an increased risk of some malignant neoplasms.”
I suppose that most blood recipients are probably better off with increased PFAS than going without the infusion, but the article sure presents the situation clumsily.
If this causes more people to donate, it's probably a good thing overall, even if the people doing it are doing so in the hopes of cleansing their own system of these chemicals.
We could also say that given a choice between death and HIV, the blood recipient would still want the blood.
…yes?
With respect to PFAS, which is a general societal/environmental issue it's likely that all donated blood has roughly the same PFAS levels, so recipient either gets blood with PFAS or no blood at all; and the "new" blood might have slightly more or less PFAS than the recipients current blood, but the recipient already has a comparable level of PFAS anyway.
The thing is, donated blood is always in short supply. you dont have much choice, when you have a serious blood-loss.
edit: I would be very angry if sombody would have chosen to use hiv blood on me while I was uncounciuos. Similar to how I would be angry if my arm would be amputated, while my conciousness was away.
But let do some simple math. Let's say I (and a dozen other donors) have 10ng/mL of PFAS in my system and a recipient has 5ng/mL. Assuming 20 pints of blood in a human for the rest of this word problem. Recipient requires a transfusion of 10 pints which happen to be sourced by those 12 donors, What is their PFAS load after the transfusion?
˥ɯ/ƃuϛ˙ㄥ :ɹǝʍsu∀
That's just one use case, obviously, so there is a system for some to get rid of excess blood, at least, in a similar manner as you would donate.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30808856
[1] https://www.redcrossblood.org/donate-blood/blood-donation-pr...
It turns out I didn't have hemochromatosis. It was merely a bit high, but knowing that I donated so often (both whole blood and platelets, which you can do more often), there was concern that the "self-treatment" was covering up a real problem.
I had not heard at the time that they wouldn't have wanted my blood. It was over a decade ago, and it's possible that the policy didn't exist then.
It amused me very much at the time to think that "bloodletting" might, in fact, be medically prescribed.
> Some people, he tells us, absorb too much iron, often as a result of a genetic condition called hereditary hemochromatosis. Over the years, the extra iron builds up slowly in people's bodies, causing damage to organs such as the liver and heart as well as the joints.
> What contains a lot of iron? Red blood cells! That's what. Thus, the therapy for iron overload (as it's also called) is to draw pint after pint of blood from patients until the iron stores drop to an acceptable level, and thereafter draw the occasional unit of blood so those levels don't creep up again.
Sounds very familiar if you replace "iron" with "PFAS".
Alternatively, it's easy to DIY if you are so inclined. You just need some sterile needles and alcohol swabs.
Science is, and has always been, about adjusting our flawed, incomplete models as new evidence emerge. We shouldn't let our ill-informed preconceptions prevent humanity from moving forward.
If removing blood from the body takes forever chemicals with it and we have no practical way of filtering those chemicals out, then discarding the blood (yes, bloodletting) is the moral way to do it. Irrational and uneducated biases need not apply.
Are there services for bloodletting?
So even the tech can’t see that it’ll ultimately be disposed of?
Veritasium has a great YouTube video about this: "The Man Who Accidentally Killed The Most People In History"[0]
Now I eat more spinach and chicken to give myself a boost but I'm taking a little break to recoup before going back again.
Either way, donating's great, totally should do it, it's super essential and there're always shortages. Just make sure you're supporting yourself if you make it a habit.
So presumably they could just pass back the results of that test
EDIT>> Maybe a punch card? Donate N pints, get a free blood panel.
Lab companies absolutely should be included, as a co-equal, in the list of villains.
I find it interesting though that the argument to donate blood is that one's blood might be toxic. That giving away your toxic blood might make your own blood less toxic.
> The logic in removing them is simple: PFAS work by binding to serum proteins in the blood; removing some of this blood, therefore, would lead to the reduction of forever chemicals in the bloodstream. As to the question of what happens to recipients of this blood: “Perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances are ubiquitous, and no threshold has been identified that poses an increased risk to recipients of donated blood components.”
I've also wondered, is it possible for a transfusion recipient to fail a drug screening test because their doner had recently consumed drug prior to their donation.
I’d certainly be happy to have blood drawn if it meant lowering blood toxicity I had no other way of treating.
I think fad diets are the terrority where it gets a bit unreasonable (juice cleanses?). Chakra/Qi cleanses?
Body acidity is a myth, cleaning organs like the kidney or liver is a myth, and all the detox treatments peddled have never been shown to actually remove any toxins from a human.
Example: people overdose on Tylenol, and we may have to give them NAC (N-acetyl-cysteine) to boost their depleted glutathione levels and get rid of the toxins.
Another example: people ingest a poison, and sometimes it's appropriate to make them drink activated charcoal so it can bind the toxins. These types of "Detoxes" are also common (but over-used) in the alternative world.
Another example: with some infections, you can't give too many antibiotics at once or it will overload the body's detox capacity, so things are done to help.
Another example: 9/11 workers who were exposed to massive amounts of toxins from burning building materials afterwards suffered from that exposure. Conventional medical doctors came up with detox protocols including the use of Far Infrared Saunas to help decrease the toxin load in their bodies.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/articlepdf/...
> “Plasma donation was the most effective intervention, reducing mean serum perfluorooctane sulfonate levels by 2.9 ng/mL compared with a 1.1-ng/mL reduction with blood donation, a significant difference
But how much perfluorooctane sulfonate did the study's subjects start with? I don't care if one treatment accomplished more than another until I know that at least one of them made a difference worth making.
A filter which excludes all of the things you don’t want in your blood and left anything besides plain water would be hard, not worth the trouble.
PFAS materials (teflon, high temperature o-rings, refrigeration fluids, fire-fighting foams, anti-cancer drugs and other medicines, etc.) encompass such a broad range of chemistries (anything with the fluorine atom attached to carbon) that have many many orders of magnitude differences in half-life.
It’s analogous to labeling anything radioactive (bananas) as a “forever chemical” because some radioactive nuclear waste does have >10k year half-lives.
The nice thing about PFAS compared to nuclear though is that even the ‘forever’ versions that have really long half-lives can be easily catalyzed to break down using the right materials/temperature/pressure.
People are looking for catalysis processes to get rid of nuclear waste using atto-second lasers: https://bigthink.com/the-present/laser-nuclear-waste/ (Would be amazing if it works)
Also, fluorine incorporation in water is starting to be reconsidered by some in the medical community (greatest volume of human fluorine consumption by far): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8169995/
PFAS is already in everyone's bloodstream because we slathered our cookware and dental floss in it, and nobody can stand up to DuPont.
Maybe a story prompt about vampires that discover they are dying due to heavy metal buildup in their systems. They go out in search of remote island nations that have populations with little exposure to modern low level contaminants. Have to adopt to slow island life.
Donation of Blood Is Associated with Reduced Risk of Myocardial Infarction
https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/148/5/445/76921
Regular blood donation may help in the management of hypertension
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/trf.13428
Regular blood donation may lower iron stores, and this in turn lowers lipid peroxidation.
On that note I guess leaches would work too.
However, these general blood tests won't test for PFAS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31125559
Eventually, DNA sequencing will become extremely cheap and Red Cross will sequence all of their samples. Then the DNA data will get stolen, as happened to the Red Cross's refugee database recently [1].
Therefore, people who value their privacy and the privacy of their relatives may wish to use blood-letting instead of blood donation.
[0] https://www.redcrossblood.org/content/dam/redcrossblood/cont...
[1] https://www.icrc.org/en/document/sophisticated-cyber-attack-...
That's good. The rest: Eh. It's fairly weak as some kind of medical recommendation if you ask me.
That seems kind of strange they never get filtered or end up in organs.
Those medieval sawbones knew some stuff.
Anyway it does seem like certain stuff seems to build up in the blood-stream over the years, with the body having no way of removing it, and that bleeding and receiving plasma effectively gets rid of it.
I wonder if this could be considered as a real medical treatment and offered to people.
I'm negative for cytomegalovirus, which makes my blood suitable for newborns, cancer patients, HIV patents, etc. I used to donate as often as the Red Cross/New York Blood Center would let me (donating plasma in the in-between times when it was too soon to donate whole blood), but at some point that forced me to get off of my red-meat-once-a-week diet because my iron levels were bouncing down around the donation limits.
I didn't realize one check-up with my regular doctor was going to involve a blood screening, so when the nurse drew blood, I told her that I was going to test as anemic since I donated less than a week earlier. I saw the nurse enter my comments into the computer system, but I still got a very concerned call from my doctor a week later about being anemic. The doctor hadn't read the comment on my chart that I had donated recently, but still begged me to eat more red meat and liver and/or cut back on my blood donation frequency. I asked about spinach, broccoli, etc., and she said it was just very difficult to get enough iron that way if I was donating blood that often.
I called up the New York Blood Center to see if my regular doctor was over-reacting and/or they had any suggestions about keeping my iron high while donating as often as possible and still keeping red meat consumption low. They told me that there weren't any long-term studies on people who donate as often as they're allowed over long periods. Also, they reaffirmed that red meat and liver are really much more dense sources of iron than any plant sources.
Anyway, when you donate whole blood/plasma regularly and you're CMV-negative, they cross-check your blood for leukocyte compatibility with immunocompromised patients. Three times, I was asked to donate leukocytes for kids with cancer. Two times I was able to donate leukocytes, and the third time, my hematocrit was too low. I highly recommend it, if nothing else, you feel like a really decent person for a couple of weeks after donating leukocytes to a kid with cancer. It's a pretty low-effort way to leave the world a little better than you found it.
I moved to Hong Kong for a while, and there, they take 400 mL instead of a 500 mL, and let you donate less often, but the minimum body weight limit for donation is lower. (People there are smaller on average and eat less red meat than the average American.) I was also very involved with dragon boat racing there, and being slightly anemic makes training harder, so I only donated once a year in HK. I really should have donated more in the off season.
Now, I've got a young son who's blood-compatible with me, so even though they'd never run my blood directly into my son, my wife would really prefer that I keep my blood in my veins for emergencies. I'd still prefer to donate blood, but my wife really doesn't ask that much from me, and it's a small thing to give up for a few years.
Volume.
A blood sample is at a stretch max 20ml. A blood donation is about 300ml.