Cleaning Cholesterol From Blood Also Lowered Forever Chemicals and Plastics, and Nobody Knows Why
Early measurements found double filtration plasmapheresis reduced PFAS by up to 25% and lowered microplastic counts in four patients, researchers said.
- On August 4, 2026, researchers at the Technical University of Dresden reported that apheresis, a procedure typically used to filter fat molecules from blood, also reduced levels of forever chemicals and microplastics in study participants.
- Apheresis has been used for about four decades to treat cholesterol, but this study investigated whether the procedure could remove PFAS, which biomonitoring finds in more than 99 percent of the United States population.
- Assessing 34 patients, researchers observed up to 25 percent reductions in specific PFAS compounds across two sessions. Independent laboratories found nanoparticle counts dropped by about 70 percent in some participants after a single session.
- "We did not go looking for this," said Stefan R. Bornstein, corresponding author from University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus, cautioning that the machine captured pollutants but has not proven the body is rid of them.
- Researchers cautioned that this was not a randomized controlled trial and have not demonstrated that apheresis removes plastic already bound in tissue, identifying whether it can reach such deposits as the key question ahead.
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More than 4,700 perfluoroalkylated and polyfluoroalkylated substances (known as PFAS), are used commercially or are found free in the environment and an absorbed compound at age 30 can still be detected at age 40
Blood Cleansing Procedure Removes Microplastics And PFAS Along With Cholesterol
International endocrinologists found that apheresis—a procedure designed to remove excess cholesterol from the blood—simultaneously reduces concentrations of perfluorinated compounds (PFAS) and microplastic particles. The study indicates that these pollutants use lipoproteins as transport vehicles, though the small patient sample size means this cannot yet be considered a universal detoxification method. How Pollutants Are Removed Apheresis is a…
Cleaning cholesterol from blood also lowered forever chemicals and plastics, and nobody knows why
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances and plastic particles may not drift through the bloodstream alone. The working hypothesis is that they bind lipids and proteins, forming aggregates that persist for years. A team at Technische Universität Dresden asked whether therapeutic apheresis, an extracorporeal therapy developed to strip lipoproteins from patients with severe dyslipidemia, also removes such contaminants. In small exploratory cohorts, PFA…
Blood filtration method helps clear circulating lipids and toxic microplastics
The machine is not new. Some version of it has run in hospital treatment rooms for about four decades, drawing blood from one arm, separating out the plasma, passing it across a filter or an adsorber, and returning it to the other arm.
The apheresis department of Carl Gustav Carus University Hospital at Dresden Technical University, Germany, has been filtering the blood of patients whose cholesterol never drops, no matter how many drugs they eat. It is one of the largest centers in the world for this technique, where up to 10,000 procedures are performed annually. Blood comes out of one arm of the patient, plasma is separated and passed through a filter to remove lipids, and p…
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