PFAS Increase Likelihood of Death By Cardiovascular Disease, Study Shows (theguardian.com) 34
New submitter berghem shares a report from The Guardian: For the first time, researchers have formally shown that exposure to toxic PFAS increases the likelihood of death by cardiovascular disease, adding a new level of concern to the controversial chemicals' wide use. The findings are especially significant because proving an association with death by chemical exposure is difficult, but researchers were able to establish it by reviewing death records from northern Italy's Veneto region, where many residents for decades drank water highly contaminated with PFAS, also called "forever chemicals." Records further showed an increased likelihood of death from several cancers, but stopped short of establishing a formal association because of other factors. [...]
Veneto's drinking water was widely contaminated by a PFAS-production plant between 1985 and 2018. Researchers first found an excess of about 4,000 deaths during this period, or about one every three days. Part of the region was supplied with water from a different source, giving researchers the opportunity to compare records for tens of thousands of people who drank contaminated water and lived near those who did not. Though PFAS can affect the cardiovascular system in different ways, it is largely a problem because it produces stubbornly high and dangerous levels of cholesterol. The levels are difficult to control because they aren't caused by dietary or lifestyle choices that can be addressed with adjustments, but hormonal changes that affect the metabolism and the body's ability to control plaque in arteries. The study's authors suspect that post-traumatic stress disorder caused by the environmental disaster, which upended lives across the region, may also be contributing to circulatory disease. The evidence of a jump in kidney cancer was also "very clear," [said Annibale Biggeri, the peer-reviewed study's lead author, and a researcher with the University of Padua]. In the study's first five years, 16 cases were recorded, while 65 were recorded in the last five years. It also found elevated levels of testicular cancer during some time periods.
The records "showed clearly" that earlier life exposures led to higher levels of mortality, except for women who have multiple children. Previous research has found levels were higher in women with only one child. The chemicals accumulate in placentas and are passed on to children during pregnancy, which reduces levels in the body. Mortality levels among women who were of child-bearing age were generally lower, but increased in older women. The chemicals will be passed down to children for generations, said Laura Facciolo, a Veneto resident who drank contaminated water. She said the findings underscore the need to ban PFAS, and the disaster's injustice. The findings have been published in the journal Environmental Health.
Veneto's drinking water was widely contaminated by a PFAS-production plant between 1985 and 2018. Researchers first found an excess of about 4,000 deaths during this period, or about one every three days. Part of the region was supplied with water from a different source, giving researchers the opportunity to compare records for tens of thousands of people who drank contaminated water and lived near those who did not. Though PFAS can affect the cardiovascular system in different ways, it is largely a problem because it produces stubbornly high and dangerous levels of cholesterol. The levels are difficult to control because they aren't caused by dietary or lifestyle choices that can be addressed with adjustments, but hormonal changes that affect the metabolism and the body's ability to control plaque in arteries. The study's authors suspect that post-traumatic stress disorder caused by the environmental disaster, which upended lives across the region, may also be contributing to circulatory disease. The evidence of a jump in kidney cancer was also "very clear," [said Annibale Biggeri, the peer-reviewed study's lead author, and a researcher with the University of Padua]. In the study's first five years, 16 cases were recorded, while 65 were recorded in the last five years. It also found elevated levels of testicular cancer during some time periods.
The records "showed clearly" that earlier life exposures led to higher levels of mortality, except for women who have multiple children. Previous research has found levels were higher in women with only one child. The chemicals accumulate in placentas and are passed on to children during pregnancy, which reduces levels in the body. Mortality levels among women who were of child-bearing age were generally lower, but increased in older women. The chemicals will be passed down to children for generations, said Laura Facciolo, a Veneto resident who drank contaminated water. She said the findings underscore the need to ban PFAS, and the disaster's injustice. The findings have been published in the journal Environmental Health.
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Competing interests
LF, MZ, and GF are civil parties in the trial currently underway at the Vicenza Court, focusing on PFAS contamination in the provinces of Vicenza, Padua and Verona.
Riiiiiight.
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Cardiomyopathy. That's been studied and there is a lot of data after the whole COVID-19 thing. Except that's a complication of a viral infection, not a complication from immune response to a vaccine.
Myocarditis is definitely a complication for a vaccine. Any immune response can lead to Myocarditis. So if you planned on avoiding the jab, then I recommend you also avoid getting a COVID-19 infection too.
Famously, a Cytokine storm is a complication of the COVID-19 vaccine. It's rare, with less than a dozen case
Re:Correlation vs causation (Score:5, Informative)
From the study itself (pages 16 and 17):
Some methodological issues of this study need to be considered. First, the study was based on aggregate data at the municipality level and the interpretation of the results depends on the assumption of homogeneity of exposure within municipalities
95% of the population got their water from aqueducts, if the PFASs make it that far I think it's safe to assume a fairly uniform distribution within the affected municipalities.
Second, we could not adjust the association of PFAS exposure with the risk of cardiovascular disease
Of course they couldn't because they don't know the full mechanism. Suppose PFAS exposure causes hypertension and hypertension causes heart disease. Well you adjust for hypertension and the heart disease effect goes away and you falsely conclude that the PFAS didn't cause heart disease.
Third, our period of observation began approximately 15years after the onset of exposure because of limita- tions in availability of mortality data. As a consequence, we excluded from the exposed population those munici- palities with groundwater contamination since 1966
Again, if you don't know the pre-exposure rate of mortality then what exactly are you supposed to calculate?
And fourth, comparisons with other studies from the same area should be made with some caution because of the possibility that the municipalities considered to rep- resent the âcontaminated areaâ(TM) and the uncontaminated (or reference) area have been selected using data from different reports of regional authorities or have been defined according to criteria partly different from ours. The selection of the uncontaminated area is particularly prone to arbitrary assumptions and between-studies variation, with a risk of misclassification of exposure.
As for the last one: "we're unsure if our data is what we think it is".
They're saying the PFAS exposure doesn't perfectly follow the boundaries of the regions.... but it's good enough.
How the fuck did this even get peer-reviewed?
Because a natural experiment is never going to be completely clean and flawless data. But if you find a strong effect in a natural experiment, even with the limitations, it's still damn valuable data.
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You clearly don't understand how science is done. Real scientists always look at possible weaknesses in their studies and disclose them.
You've clearly only have experience on the Internet where everyone is always 100% right and certain.
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You clearly don't understand how science is done. Real scientists always look at possible weaknesses in their studies and disclose them. You've clearly only have experience on the Internet where everyone is always 100% right and certain.
Sure, I only have two grad degrees and am working on my third one. Yeah, I know nothing about scientific research. At all. Especially data. Totally clueless.
Nope nope nope, I recognize a flawed study written only to make headlines and get citations when I see one.
Just ban PFAS (Score:2)
There's enough evidence. Ban PFAS!
Boycott the companies that use them, that make them, or even think about fighting bans in court!
Keeping things shiny is no excuse for killing people.
I see the 'correlation is not causation' FUD-wars start up all over again as we saw smoking, then passive smoking, and now vaping.
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Sure, when something is shown unambiguously bad and unnecessary, we can do without.
But how much of a factor are teh PFAS compared to other lifestyle factors like overindulging in food and underindulging in body movement?
And yeah, the vested interests will run campaigns against threats to their business, even using my argument :)
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Tell us more, reveal all your fantasies. Don't be shy.
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But how much of a factor are teh PFAS compared to other lifestyle factors like overindulging in food and underindulging in body movement?
PFAS are a persistent environmental pollutant. Liver damage and birth defects in wildlife has nothing to do with my fried chicken intake.
And yeah, the vested interests will run campaigns against threats to their business, even using my argument :)
Would you considered yourself someone who has a disciplined mind? That your thought processes and organization are logical and stay laser-focused on a topic? Or do you find yourself darting to one subject to another, with a relative difficulty in holding a single idea in your mind before it is replaced by another? I'm genuinely curious.
Re: Just ban PFAS (Score:1)
PFAS, as you say, are persistent and ubiquitous. And they've certainly been increasing over time. But life expectancy is increasing over that time.
How many people used to die because we didn't use plastic?
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Nice thought, except, as we know from many a +5 opinions in Slashdot discussions, you can't prove a negative :)
So, you have to legally define what qualifies as "unambiguously harmless" in a concrete manner.
And generically enough, so it is future-proof.
Go ahead, I'm not that smart.
As for the diminishing returns in material science, I don't think we're even close to that part yet. With femtochemistry already turning a large area of what used to be quantum mechanics into classical problems, and machine learnin
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> Sure, when something is shown unambiguously bad and unnecessary, we can do without.
They have been shown to be unambiguously bad. As for necessity, keeping things shiny doesn't count.
> But how much of a factor are teh PFAS compared to other lifestyle factors like overindulging in food and underindulging in body movement?
Good question, but one well-designed studies already address.
When the EPA (https://www.epa.gov/pfas/our-current-understanding-human-health-and-environmental-risks-pfas) says that PFAS
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In this case, "correlation is not causation" is pure stupidity (of which lots of people have tons). Obviously, cardiovascular diseases do not cause more PFAS. That leaves one option for non-causation: a common thing that causes more cardiovascular diseases _and_ more PFAS. That thing would have found by now if it existed. Hence yes, this is causation.
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In this case, "correlation is not causation" is pure stupidity (of which lots of people have tons).
What else is new? Who hasn't received the message at this point when you are constantly reminding everyone else how stupid they are?
Obviously, cardiovascular diseases do not cause more PFAS. That leaves one option for non-causation: a common thing that causes more cardiovascular diseases _and_ more PFAS. That thing would have found by now if it existed. Hence yes, this is causation.
For all we know PFAS is a nullity / red herring and the uptick of poor health outcomes is a function of something else entirely. Given the baseline for the study is 1980s it is for example possible deteriorating lifestyle choices as a function of time accounts for the observed health outcomes of statistical significance.
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For all we know PFAS is a nullity / red herring and the uptick of poor health outcomes is a function of something else entirely.
So you are claiming the correlation is not there? Are you going for a Big Lie? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie)
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So you are claiming the correlation is not there?
I don't think anyone is doubting the correlation exists. The issue is what factor(s) are causal.
Your commentary was focused on causation. "Obviously, cardiovascular diseases do not cause more PFAS. That leaves one option for non-causation: a common thing that causes more cardiovascular diseases _and_ more PFAS."
These types of inferences whether or not A caused B or B caused A depend on credible isolation of a specific cause and sufficient accounting of confounding variables to rule out other cause(s). Whe
Illusionary conclusion (Score:2, Interesting)
"For all causes of death, we found strong evidence for an increased mortality risk vs. the baseline level of the 1980s, an increase that was present even after 2010. "
The main criticism I have of this study is they don't even try to falsify their assumptions. They could have easily conducted the same analysis in a comparable setting without any known contamination and looked for similar signals.
The use of time as a "baseline" given well known general trends of increasingly unhealthy lifestyles with substan
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The main criticism I have of this study is they don't even try to falsify their assumptions. They could have easily conducted the same analysis in a comparable setting without any known contamination and looked for similar signals.
False. There is no comparable setting without any known contamination.
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False. There is no comparable setting without any known contamination.
The study operated on the premise significant localized contamination of the water system (presumably from an upstream factory) lead to an increase in adverse health outcomes.
The solution is re-rolling a similar analysis somewhere else without known contamination problems and comparing the results.
There is obviously nowhere free of PFAS. That is not the point. The point is finding a dose response signal and mitigating obvious confounders.
Yoga Pants may cause cardiovascular disease& d (Score:4, Interesting)
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/p... [cbsnews.com]
PFAS are in:
- "rain jackets, hiking pants, shirts and yoga pants and sports bras "
- "products made with Gore-Tex. Such breathable yet waterproof layers of fabric are used in jackets, pants, boots, and gloves"
- "high concentrations of PFAS in materials used in children's [school] uniforms marketed as stain-resistant."
- "carpeting or furniture, as well as fabric treatments sprayed on furniture and clothing."
- "PFAS can end up — either from fabric or dust particles — in the skin's oil and sweat. "
And the comedy of getting the banned just as the patents run out so that the next generation of patented chemical treatments can make money for manufacturers (*freon anyone*)
"The EPA has set out to regulate some older-generation chemicals generally found in imported products. Those have also been banned in the European Union and phased out by major U.S. manufacturers, often replaced by newer-generation PFAS, which leave the body more swiftly and are less likely to build up in organs. "
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I guess we'll all have to find some other way to pretend that we regularly go to Yoga workshops. It's a bit shocking to think of how people did yoga 50 or 100 years ago without foam mats and stretchy pants.
already being banned elsewhere (Score:1)
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Might be why several of my cousins there died (Score:2)
In the past 20 years I have had several of my cousins in northern Italy die from cancer at young ages whereas none of my cousins here in New Zealand have. They all lived above the city of Padua in its province. They all lived in rural areas near small towns and used groundwater from their bores. There has been a lot of nitrate contamination in their water for about thirty years so for drinking they have used bottled water or brought in water from other areas. The bore water is still used for crops and anima