A machine that’s been running in hospitals for roughly four decades just turned up an unexpected side effect. Therapeutic apheresis , a treatment that filters blood to strip out excess cholesterol in patients whose levels won’t budge with medication, appears to pull PFAS (“forever chemicals”) and microplastics out of the bloodstream along with the fat it was designed to remove. Nobody set out to test this. A team at Technische Universität Dresden, which runs the largest apheresis program in the world, decided to check what else was ending up in the discard bag.
The idea behind it
PFAS are a
family of over 4,700 synthetic compounds found in the blood of more than 99% of
the U.S. population, with some taking years to clear the body. Microplastics
are just as pervasive, people are estimated to ingest tens of thousands of
plastic particles a year, and the particles have turned up in blood, placenta,
lung tissue, and brain tissue in prior research.
The researchers’ working idea is that both pollutants don’t just float freely in blood, they may stick to fat particles like LDL cholesterol, picking up a coating of lipids and proteins that makes them larger and longer-lived in circulation. If that’s true, a machine built to filter out lipoproteins at scale should drag some of these pollutants out with them.
What the results showed
In a small
study of patients undergoing the procedure, cholesterol and inflammation
markers dropped as expected. But blood tests from two independent labs also
found real reductions in several PFAS compounds after treatment, in some cases
over 40–70% lower after a single session, with the chemicals also showing up in
the material the machine filtered out.
The plastics data was messier. Using several detection methods across a handful of patients, some plastic types consistently decreased while others rose or barely changed, and the authors are upfront that the results are exploratory and inconsistent across individuals. One striking but very small finding: when apheresis was paired with an additional filtering device, two patients showed complete removal of certain plastic types from detectable levels. Separately, the team used a laser-based imaging technique to directly locate plastic particles embedded in human skin tissue, confirming plastics aren’t just passing through the blood but settling into tissue.
What it doesn’t show
The
researchers are careful to flag major limitations: tiny sample sizes, no
control group, no long-term outcome data, and no proof yet that the treatment
reaches plastic already lodged in tissue rather than just what’s circulating in
blood at the time. Lead author Stefan Bornstein was direct that this isn’t a
demonstrated treatment, the next step is animal studies using radioactive
tracers to see whether apheresis can reach plastics that have already settled
into the body.
Also worth noting: this isn’t a poverty-linked exposure. Prior research has actually found that PFAS exposure tends to rise with income, likely tied to diet (seafood in particular) and PFAS-treated fabrics, which means the “worst hit” patients aren’t necessarily who you’d expect.
Why it matters
Apheresis isn’t a scalable public health fix, it’s an intensive, hospital-based procedure for people with specific medical needs, not a detox spa treatment. But if the underlying hypothesis holds up, it could reshape how researchers think about where pollutants hide in the body and how (or whether) they can be cleared. For now, the authors are blunt that prevention still beats cleanup: avoiding exposure in the first place remains far easier than trying to filter it out afterward.
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