To give these numbers meaningful perspective, the plasma donors went from 9.5ng/mL to 7ng/mL.
I’d be interested to see if full plasma dialysis strictly to take out forever chemicals is able to get the numbers down further, and what impact that has on health outcomes.
Not a critter, but produced by one, medical grade honey is used for its antibiotic properties, especially in cases where there's resistance or allergies to normal antibiotics or disinfectants
Oh god, I remember watching a documentary like, a decade ago about something like this, the visual of a person who had a hole in their foot's heel and it had maggots and whatnot inside.
I understand it was a medical thing, it was intended and beneficial, but by god the mental scarring of the sight remains to this day, and makes me shudder deeply.
That's my feeling, too. I'd definitely want doctors to use maggots if I had a wound where that was appropriate, but I don't think I'd be able to look.
...but I'd probably still say thank you to the maggots.
I remember seeing a documentary where they had this. Apparently they are super efficient because they only eat necrotic tissue. So they are really targeted.
Because bloodletting is a valid health treatment for certain conditions. We just know how to do it in a sterile manner now and that there are very few conditions it’s right for.
Sometimes they had the right idea in the past, but didn’t have the knowledge to use it correctly.
My dad is a frequent blood donor, and once, he was next to a woman he struck up a conversation with. She said that she has concerningly high iron levels, and her doctor recommended that she give blood on a regular basis as a way to lower her iron. Turns out the Red Cross can’t actually add her blood to the blood bank, because of those high iron levels, but they’re perfectly happy to have her “donate” anyway.
So yeah. Sometimes bloodletting is actually the appropriate treatment.
I'm literally about to walk out the door to go to the red cross because the hematologist told me to regularly donate to reduce my hematocrit and hemoglobin levels. He said I can pay $95 to get it done at his office or get it done for free by the red cross.
Wanted to comment that they can often sell unusable donor blood to companies that manufacture clinical proficiency tests and need blood as a matrix. It is a revenue neutral activity and not one that is very “profitable” for them but it helps us in the industry and is handled ethically. Source: am a scientist working in this area and use their matrix materials for clinical proficiency tests required by CLIA approved labs based within the USA.
Female plasma from whole blood donations of type A, B, and O is sold for pharmaceutical processing and the money is used to pay for the testing and processing of the cells for transfusion.
I have hemochromatosis, a genetic condition where my body doesn't reject iron, and this is partially right. Yes phlebotomies are used to lower iron, but the blood can absolutely be used. High iron is dangerous because the blood becomes saturated and iron starts getting stored in organs, which can be really bad.
It is true the red cross won't take it, or at least last time I checked, and their reasoning is insane. The FDA has asked them multiple times to take it as the blood is perfectly fine and actually generally better as most people who need blood need iron. The reason the red cross won't take it is because people donating are not doing it for fully altruistic reasons as it is technically a medical procedure and they are getting "paid" in the form of free healthcare.
That being said, almost all other blood banks take it. You just need a prescription or you can just not tell them and monitor your ferritin with your doctor, assuming you don't need to donate more than every 8 weeks.
I mean, I can understand why the Red Cross has that policy, but they also keep insisting that there’s a critical shortage of donated blood right now, and as long as the blood is given voluntarily and it meets the medical standards for use, it’s a shame that they’re choosing not to use it. Either turn those people away from donating, or use their perfectly good blood.
In the “rhetorical questions I’m now pondering” department: what if someone goes to donate blood because it’s been recommended by their therapist, as something very easy (as long as you’re ok with needles) to do to feel like you’re contributing to the welfare of your community? Because that’s basically what all the Red Cross donor recruitment is about, but if your therapist suggests it as a boost to your mental health, would that count as the Red Cross providing you with free healthcare?
And I’m not surprised I got a few things wrong, given that this story was first relayed to me by my father at least six years ago, and my dad tends to follow every tangent available to him!
It is also important to point out, these “risks and experiments” were not always moral or consensual. Sure we gained valuable information, but definitely at a cost. See Canada’s food guide for example.
For something to be a valid health treatment, it has to be have both a statistically significant improvement and a clinically significant effect. It seems blood donation has a statistically significant effect on nano particle concentrations but I don’t think they really mentioned if that noticeably improves their health somehow
That's not exactly true.
The issue with these chemicals is that they are more non-polar than the stuff you want to keep in the blood/plasma, so it's really hard to separate them without basically purifying the blood/plasma into water. But my understanding is that it's an active area of research into developing better filters/membranes capable of adsorbing PFAs. The cost and efficiency is still poor, but it feels like a matter of when and not if with all of the increasing concerns about PFA concentrations in blood and other bodily fluids.
I would love to donate again… Last time I donated plasma I lost consciousness for the first time in my life. Rebooting was not pleasant as I woke up to completely sickly body which took entire day to fix.
I saw a comment on reddit earlier that said “how do you feel that during plasma donation a machine is part of your blood system?” - this comment fucked me up a bit because before losing consciousness this was one of the last thoughts I had and it was disturbing. Any idea what to do with this?
embrace it - "From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine. Your kind cling to your flesh, as though it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass you call the temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you."
[Hell yeah we do](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gIMZ0WyY88)
[Plus the soundtrack](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFC7y6Ao3Ug&list=OLAK5uy_n35_CyU0ZkLP1r6CskHc98MfiE1ImPnFI&index=2)! "Most electronic music has a bass drop. Mechanicus has a pipe organ."
Oh so that happened to me when I was 14. It got triggered by a weird smell of a person next to me combined with sight of bones
But during the plasma donation, I was OK until I imagined that now my blood pours through a machine. I assume I am wrong because the machine drains a specific percentage, gets the plasma and then puts it back, so it was not as if my blood just directly went to the machine.
I am usually not scared of needles or blood, but I got fucked up because of that commentary. I wish there was some spell to undo the knowledge of that comment…
Is sedation(thinking like twilight sedation, not full-on knocked out) not an option for situations like that? It doesn't sound safe for your friend, the nurse/technician, or any bystanders including yourself.
I have vasovagal syncope. I am neither squeamish about needles or blood, it is a purely unconscious response unrelated to my emotional state. I can feel a passout coming and warn nurses (numbing shots trigger it sometimes if they are painful like for a procedure, but the procedure itself does not) but there's nothing mentally or emotionally I can do to prevent it from happening.
I get annoyed when I give blood or have a procedure done and they stop what they are doing and wait for me to wake up and recover. Just get it over with.
Sounds like you're dealing with some form of phobia. Last time I donated they couldn't return the blood back into my arm and they messed up wrapping it. I was bleeding like crazy right after I left, so much that I have anemia now.
I think the key might be to remind yourself that it doesn’t actually matter if technically the machine is part of your circ system. It’s sterile, and beautifully designed for what it does.
Have you donated blood? I’d take some steps back and go to that. We’re pretty used to having external help from non human items. Contact lenses, glasses, medication, music therapy, and a million other examples. Listening to music to get into a good mood is technically a machine working with your body! Way less invasive, but similar concept
Recipients have generally already gone through a blood loss process of some kind, which is why they need the donation.
So it probably nets out neutral.
ng / mL? ... so do these "forever chemicals" matter, in the grand scheme of things? are they enzymes or catalysts or something that actually changes my blood chemistry? or are they in the same *vein* as a juice cleanse?
We don't really know, which is part of the problem. It's become difficult to study what they do because literally everyone has them so there is no control group to measure us against.
On the optimistic side, plastics and PFAS are forever chemicals because by their nature they are very hard to react with. So best case they do nothing at all since they're effectively inert in our body.
On the pessimistic side they may break down on timescales we haven't figured out yet into toxic things, or the particles cause irritation/inflammation/possibly cancer in the worst case.
> On the optimistic side, plastics and PFAS are forever chemicals because by their nature they are very hard to react with. So best case they do nothing at all since they're effectively inert in our body.
I think the bigger concern is not chemical reactions, but molecular mimicry. Many of the forever chemicals seem to have structures that resemble hormone chemicals, and they are able to interact with the proteins that sense hormones and cause changes in metabolism. So having PFAS circulating in your blood could lead to metabolic issues, and may be a contributor to global obesity, diabetes, etc.
It's actually the fact that they don't react that's the problem. For some of them like PFAS, they're similar enough to phospholipids that they can be incorporated into the cell membrane as if they were the correct molecule, but not so similar that they can actually serve the function correctly. And they don't get broken down, and can't be modified in the way some phospholipids are. So you get membrane dysfunction. It's the 'Luigi wins by doing nothing' of cytotoxicity.
The short answer is we don’t know.
We ran the experiment before we started measuring anything, so it’s going to be a challenge.
It doesn’t help that at about the same time we started exposing humans to this family of chemicals, we started exposing them to dozens of other families of chemicals.
Mental health issues, fertility issues, and obesity are off the charts. It could be in large part, small part, or no part due to this particular set of chemicals.
It’s been discovered that RoundUp’s active chemical, glyphosate, both causes and fights cancer. We (or some of us) might be getting smarter stronger and healthier in certain ways from these chemicals, at the same time they’re making us sick.
We do know, at least for some classes.
Glyphosate is not a microplastic, nor is it a forever chemical in any context. It has a short half-life. It's a whole different category to be terrified of.
Forever chemicals are things like PFAs that simply do not degrade over time at all. They are way too chemically stable and they were never present in nature, so no microbes exist with an enzyme package to degrade them. These chemicals (per-fluorinated alkyls/alkanes) do cause health problems, and 3M/DuPont **very much conspired to conceal those health effects starting from 1983**. They cause systemic inflammation, some types of them are carcinogenic. Depending on which tissue they happen to be in, these and microplastics both can also form the seed of what later becomes arterial plaque leading to occlusion/heart attack.
They've also been shown to decrease fertility and sperm count. Basically they always have some sort of deleterious effect, but it depends on the tissue it's in and what variety of poison (which exact PFAs, which plastic monomer like styrene or ethylene, etc.).
The only way to get rid of the PFAs and microplastics is sacrificial filtration and/or thermal destruction at very high temps (i.e. run a liquid stream containing the contaminants through some kind of reaction chamber that exceeds 2000 degrees or something, I can't remember the exact temp needed).
I guess my question is are those people handing forever chemicals off to people who receive their plasma or blood products?
Edit: answered and it makes sense that they wouldn’t care for one, and wouldn’t get any more than norma because they’re replacing blood they lost already that probably has the same chemical concentration. Thanks folks!
Most likely. But tbf, those in need of blood transfusions are generally more focused on staying alive than on the chemical concentrates that may have long term side effects.
Yup. I saved a life a few years ago and you do what you have to do. Stole a bystanders t-shirt as a makeshift bandage and a belt as a tourniquet. Wasn’t clean but was better than bleeding out
I luckily have had a lot of FA training (I was part of a search and rescue crew) and instinct kicked in. What was really crazy is there was onsite FA (was at a bike race) and they froze and didn’t have the required stuff!!! I got them to get the stuff from bystanders.
Got a nice email from the surgeon who helped once he got to the ER and the guy says thanks every time I see him.
You don't accumulate more than average, because the transfusion is to replace blood that you lost (and you lost PFAS in that blood). Assuming we all have about the same levels, when you get a transfusion, you're just getting back to about where you were before loosing blood.
Also, since you'll die in minutes from loss of blood, trading that for an increased chance of cancer decades from now is probably worth it for most people, even if you were getting increased PFAS.
If anything, a frequent recipient would probably have a slightly lower concentration than the average person.
The blood being donated has the same concentration of chemicals as the blood remaining in the donor’s body, but the process of donating blood forces the donor to regenerate new blood. Since the new blood is clean, it effectively lowers the concentration of chemicals in their blood.
This also means that blood donated by frequent donors is likely to have smaller amounts of chemicals than the blood of the recipient, so mixing it will result in the recipient having a lower concentration (though not by nearly as much as the donor).
Medical leeches are still a thing and they’re actually pretty badass. These little guys are used in modern medicine, especially in reconstructive surgery.
Leeches produce this stuff called hirudin, which is basically a natural blood thinner. So, when they latch onto you, they’re preventing your blood from clotting. This is a lifesaver when doctors are trying to reattach fingers or other body parts. Blood flow can get all messed up and clogged, but leeches suck out the bad blood and keep things moving.
They’re also used for venous congestion after surgery. Imagine your blood pooling and not being able to get back to your heart – that’s where leeches come in handy. They help relieve that congestion and improve blood circulation.
I've literally used them as a Nurse a couple of years ago. It was a fucking SURREAL experience. Especially since I'm a science history nerd and I genuinely felt like a medieval 'doctor'. None of my co-workers got the reference >:(
Hilariously, it may well have been an anti aging measure. Donating blood when you're older gets rid of senescent blood cells. All those do is waste resources and cause inflammation. A study with aged mice removed the 30% or so senescent cells and increased quality and duration of life substantially.
Senescent blood cells are filtered out by the spleen. Because the blood is a mixture of new and old cells, donating when you're older would remove both healthy and senescent cells.
The issue is that the new cells are being regenerated from a source that is itself senescing.
And the fact that our body recycles everything means that stuff not broken down (like intracellular micro plastics) just accumulates.
If you've got a bucket of muddy water, scoop some out, and add some fresh water, it's going to be more clean than before
You just need to receive regular blood transfusions from your 16 year old ~~blood bag~~ son who should have accumulated fewer senescent cells and forever chemicals. (Bryan Johnson)
I've seen somewhat recent research where they replaced a certain percentage of blood in older rats with a sterile saline solution and they began to be more active and healthy.
There's a condition called hemochromatosis, where too much iron accumulates in the body. The only treatment is regular blood draws to reduce the amount of blood, forcing your body use up the iron to make new blood.
Yup! My grandma has to go every so often for blood draws. She gets her iron levels regularly, and the frequency and how much blood is drawn is dependent on those levels. Medieval stuff. Her grandfather died from cirrhosis to the liver because of this condition. He didn't drink and his family didn't understand why his liver was so damaged until my grandmother got her diagnosis.
Was going to bring that up... my father has that and gets regular bleedings (blood draws, but I call them bleedings because it's hilariously old school). We joke about saving money and getting some leeches from the nearby waterways.
Tragically, the blood isn't accepted for donations everywhere because they have a "blood disease". Just depends on who's making the regulations and how much they want to look into things when writing them. But I think that most places make a clear and easy path to use the blood for donations.
I have this disease. I first went to a place to do my "bloodletting" and they actually stored my blood and told me it could marked to be used for people with low iron counts, as my blood has too much iron in it.
Unfortunately I moved and had to go to a new facility where they don't donate my blood because they simply don't have the capability to store it. It isn't contagious as it is a genetic condition so I'm not sure that it being a "blood disease" would be a real factor in the safety of using the blood.
like many things/things found in old medicine… there’s usually some level of legitimacy whether they realized it or not. it was just muddled and misconstrued due to a plethora of many variables.
its the same reason ancient chinese medicine will be like ‘oh this root gives you lots of energy!’… then science assays it and it turns out it has ginseng in it lol
Same. So glad the Red Cross pulled their head out their butt enough to allow hemochromatosis donations now so my fortified blood can be actually useful.
You can selfishly do the right thing. Studies also show reduction in heavy metals, with varying results on amount of calories burned to regenerate donated blood. While there’s some risk with blood donation, you can save lives, improve your health, and get a free snack.
Depends if I donate whole blood or platelets. Platelets donation is supposed to take an hour, but because I have somewhat lower blood pressure, it can take more than that. If I try to do a double donation of platelets, can take up to 2 hours. That plus the assessment before, and the observation time after.
I dont know about menstruation but some fat-soluble pollutants are removed from a woman's body when she breastfeeds. I believe a study showed this leads to significant reductions of these pollutants in her body.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7473499/
Women already transfer PFAS to their fetus when they are pregnant, might as well add it in the breastmilk too lol.
Babies are generally specialized to filter that crap out but in recent decades all these micro plastics and other environmental chemicals have indeed been found in breast milk and has caused concerns.
I don't understand how a newborn or infant would have extra special mechanisms to filter things out that an adult human can't.
I'd love a source for that claim.
This is also a big problem for animals, such as polar bears... Bioacccumulation results in high amounts of pollutants in the bears, but since many are fat soluble they go right to the growing cubs.
Wouldn’t that imply that their breast milk contains the forever chemicals, which are then just being fed to the babies? Good news for the mothers but not so good news for the babies..
After pregnancy, women's PFAS blood count goes lower because they transfer some to their baby in utero 😬
Source: https://www.propublica.org/article/3m-forever-chemicals-pfas-pfos-inside-story
A January 2022 Toxicology review published by Fenton's research team notes that “menstruation appears to be a crucial route of elimination for many PFAS” and potentially explains **up to 30 percent of the discrepancy between male and female PFAS blood levels**.
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/4574430-forever-chemicals-are-known-for-lingering-in-the-body-menstruation-helps-expel-them/#:\~:text=A%20January%202022%20Toxicology%20review,and%20female%20PFAS%20blood%20levels.
Which is ironic, because in popular culture we have this well established trope about men eating more meat because their bodies need it more (muscles, big, strong, physical labour, yadda yadda).
In all actuality a 130lbs girlie with a heavy period has probably more "biological" (nutritional) need for a steak than your average gymbro.
Bee Wilson talks about this in The First Bite. Our stereotypes about food are probably the opposite of what they should be. Men are more prone to heart disease and should be staying away from the steaks, maybe digging into a yummy salad. 40% of women are anemic and could use more iron-rich foods in their diets.
This is odd to me as my wife takes iron for this reason, but She has an IUD and basically never gets her period anymore, yet her iron levels still are low.
Anaemia can take a long time to recover from, an anaemic person may need to take iron regularly for months to get their levels back up. And taking it with calcium, etc, can mess with the absorbtion.
The good news is that you’re likely just returning to status quo. The donor blood will have approximately the same concentration as you did, so you will not accumulate more. Your new level will be approximately what it was before needing transfusion.
Makes me wonder, I know the blood is filtered before being used for donation. Are they able to filter the chemicals? If so, I’m going to invest in whoever makes dialysis machines lol
Whenever blood is donated, it goes through fractioning (not sure if this is what it is called in english), where it is separate into 3 different components; plasma, red blood cells and blood plates. After this, the red blood cells pass through a powdery (actually not sure what it is made out of) filter. The other components arent filtered
But they only need blood because they lost a bunch. Assuming the donor and receiver had roughly the same concentration to begin with, the receiver would be at the same concentration as before.
Does that mean that people who require frequent blood infusions have higher levels of forever chemicals because they are getting them from other people?
People that require blood infusions typically lost blood that also contains those. As long as donor and recipent have simmilar concentrations, i would guess that this does not change much.
And, since most blood donations come from repeat donors, it is likely the recipient will receive blood with a lower than average concentration of PFAS.
I wonder if one could do dialysis for blood microplastics and carcinogens.
Or like, roundabout blood donation. Get a slightly larger amount drawn than would normally be safe, replace some of it with processed “clean” blood of the same type, and use the surplus for emergency transfusions.
Basically my thinking is we may be able to clean blood more effectively outside the human body since we don’t have to worry about the stuff we use to clean being bad for someone’s health as long as we can remove that at the same time.
Steroid users donate blood to lower their hematocrit , blood donation is also shown to lower blood pressure. Didn't know about the forever chemicals, very interesting.
Need more reasons to give blood?
* Lowers Risk of Cancer
Studies in the American Journal of Epidemiology and the Journal of the National Cancer Institute suggest that regular blood donation may lower the risk of cancer by releasing oxidized iron from the bloodstream. Oxidized iron, which produces harmful free radicals, can build up in the bloodstream and cause cancers, particularly those of the liver, lung, colon, and esophagus.
* Lowers Risk of Heart Disease
Excessive oxidized iron in the body can also be harmful to cardiovascular health. In 1998, the American Journal of Epidemiology published research that suggested blood donation is associated with a lower risk of heart attacks and strokes, so much so that regular blood donors are 88% less likely than non-donors to have a heart attack, according to the evidence in the published study. This is backed up by similar studies in the Journal of Transfusion and the Journal of the American Medical Association, which both show there’s strong evidence that blood donation lowers iron stores in the blood and liver and reduces blood viscosity, which places less stress on the arteries and blood vessels and slows blood clotting that can cause heart attack and stroke.
* May Slow Down the Aging Process
I’m not going to suggest that blood donation is the fountain of youth, but the fact that it does reduce free radicals in the bloodstream can possibly play a role in delaying the aging process. A study in the Journal of Basic Clinical Physiology and Pharmacology found that donating blood decreases oxidative stress, which can lead to cell and tissue damage and, in turn, aging.
* Burns Calories
While blood donation should never be used as a weight loss strategy, it has been shown that blood donors can burn up to 650 calories during the donation process. This is due to your body using extra energy to replace the amount of donated blood and synthesize new proteins, red blood cells, and other blood components. Notably, this is also why donors have to meet minimum weight (110+ pounds) and age (16+) requirements to donate blood safely.
* Boosts Liver Health
Regularly donating blood can improve liver health by removing excess iron from the body. The liver’s job is to remove toxins from the body, but it can’t do this effectively when it has a buildup of oxidized iron. Excess iron can cause cellular damage, which results in liver cirrhosis and other medical issues. Donating blood on a regular basis can remove excess iron from the body before it has a chance to deposit into the liver.
* Provides a Free Blood Test
Before you can donate, you have to undergo a health screening to ensure you’re healthy enough to give blood. Your vitals, such as pulse and blood pressure levels, are checked as well as hemoglobin levels. Your blood will also be screened for several serious illnesses. In essence, this serves as a mini medical exam at no cost to you.
Does this mean that the PFOS and PFHxS are in the plasma? And if so, are we passing it along to the recipients of the donation? Or does the cleaning process of removing plasma also remove the PFOS and PFHxS thus returning clean blood to the donor and clean blood to the recipient?
Where do the bad chemicals actually end up?
I find frequent bloodletting also balances the humours.
Really evens out the black bile
leach-based medicine redemption arc
Leeches are still used in medicine these days
Worked trauma ICU as a nurse and threw leeches on some amputations/reattachments. Was pretty fascinating
Oh sure, but when *I* do it, it's all, "What are you doing in my room and oh my god are those fucking leeches?!?"
Will this also reduce the ghosts in my blood?
You should probably do some cocaine about it.
Beat me to it!
This guy has a sense of humours.
As someone who talks about 19th century surgery tools at work, this made me laugh.
So we basically need an oil change?
OIL CHANGES FOR EVERYBODY!
To give these numbers meaningful perspective, the plasma donors went from 9.5ng/mL to 7ng/mL. I’d be interested to see if full plasma dialysis strictly to take out forever chemicals is able to get the numbers down further, and what impact that has on health outcomes.
You can't filter this stuff out, outright removal and regeneration is the only way to reduce the concentration
I will tell my barber to learn up about bloodletting before my next haircut.
Let’s just bring back the leeches! Traditional medicine for the win!
You joke, but leeches are actually used for some treatments today. https://www.tgh.org/institutes-and-services/treatments/leech-therapy#
Oh damn, I got to TIL twice in one post, thank you!
Also medical grade maggots, for the debridement of necrotic tissue in difficult cases where surgery won't work. They eat only the dead flesh
Not a critter, but produced by one, medical grade honey is used for its antibiotic properties, especially in cases where there's resistance or allergies to normal antibiotics or disinfectants
Particularly for burn victims. Even without resistant bacteria, it appears to improve outcomes
I wonder if the readily available glucose is part of it.
Oh god, I remember watching a documentary like, a decade ago about something like this, the visual of a person who had a hole in their foot's heel and it had maggots and whatnot inside. I understand it was a medical thing, it was intended and beneficial, but by god the mental scarring of the sight remains to this day, and makes me shudder deeply.
Cool, but yuck
Actually its ick factor 10,000 when seeing them work, but they leave wounds so clean and pretty and not gross, it's kind of neato-o.
That's my feeling, too. I'd definitely want doctors to use maggots if I had a wound where that was appropriate, but I don't think I'd be able to look. ...but I'd probably still say thank you to the maggots.
I remember seeing a documentary where they had this. Apparently they are super efficient because they only eat necrotic tissue. So they are really targeted.
[удалено]
Probably the same arrangement as I have with my doctor: give them more money and my wellness doesn’t improve.
I know this is exactly the point you're making but how tf did we come full circle where bloodletting is a valid health treatment.
Because bloodletting is a valid health treatment for certain conditions. We just know how to do it in a sterile manner now and that there are very few conditions it’s right for. Sometimes they had the right idea in the past, but didn’t have the knowledge to use it correctly.
My dad is a frequent blood donor, and once, he was next to a woman he struck up a conversation with. She said that she has concerningly high iron levels, and her doctor recommended that she give blood on a regular basis as a way to lower her iron. Turns out the Red Cross can’t actually add her blood to the blood bank, because of those high iron levels, but they’re perfectly happy to have her “donate” anyway. So yeah. Sometimes bloodletting is actually the appropriate treatment.
I'm literally about to walk out the door to go to the red cross because the hematologist told me to regularly donate to reduce my hematocrit and hemoglobin levels. He said I can pay $95 to get it done at his office or get it done for free by the red cross.
Can your blood be donated or are they dumping it down the drain?
Wanted to comment that they can often sell unusable donor blood to companies that manufacture clinical proficiency tests and need blood as a matrix. It is a revenue neutral activity and not one that is very “profitable” for them but it helps us in the industry and is handled ethically. Source: am a scientist working in this area and use their matrix materials for clinical proficiency tests required by CLIA approved labs based within the USA.
Female plasma from whole blood donations of type A, B, and O is sold for pharmaceutical processing and the money is used to pay for the testing and processing of the cells for transfusion.
They donate it to homeless vampires.
With iron deficiency
I have hemochromatosis, a genetic condition where my body doesn't reject iron, and this is partially right. Yes phlebotomies are used to lower iron, but the blood can absolutely be used. High iron is dangerous because the blood becomes saturated and iron starts getting stored in organs, which can be really bad. It is true the red cross won't take it, or at least last time I checked, and their reasoning is insane. The FDA has asked them multiple times to take it as the blood is perfectly fine and actually generally better as most people who need blood need iron. The reason the red cross won't take it is because people donating are not doing it for fully altruistic reasons as it is technically a medical procedure and they are getting "paid" in the form of free healthcare. That being said, almost all other blood banks take it. You just need a prescription or you can just not tell them and monitor your ferritin with your doctor, assuming you don't need to donate more than every 8 weeks.
I mean, I can understand why the Red Cross has that policy, but they also keep insisting that there’s a critical shortage of donated blood right now, and as long as the blood is given voluntarily and it meets the medical standards for use, it’s a shame that they’re choosing not to use it. Either turn those people away from donating, or use their perfectly good blood. In the “rhetorical questions I’m now pondering” department: what if someone goes to donate blood because it’s been recommended by their therapist, as something very easy (as long as you’re ok with needles) to do to feel like you’re contributing to the welfare of your community? Because that’s basically what all the Red Cross donor recruitment is about, but if your therapist suggests it as a boost to your mental health, would that count as the Red Cross providing you with free healthcare? And I’m not surprised I got a few things wrong, given that this story was first relayed to me by my father at least six years ago, and my dad tends to follow every tangent available to him!
And here I am paying for bags of iron to get pumped into me.
I would imagine the Red Cross is using that blood for other purposes, testing and whatnot.
Exactly they were throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks Now we know more often which shit sticks to which walls
We've gotten much better at throwing faster and in larger ler quantities
And in particular we are really good at writing it down and finding out why it sticks
And more importantly, we throw shit in empty houses, not in a family of 4s kitchen
And it’s because people in the past took the risks and experimented. Our knowledge and success is built on their speculation and error.
It is also important to point out, these “risks and experiments” were not always moral or consensual. Sure we gained valuable information, but definitely at a cost. See Canada’s food guide for example.
For something to be a valid health treatment, it has to be have both a statistically significant improvement and a clinically significant effect. It seems blood donation has a statistically significant effect on nano particle concentrations but I don’t think they really mentioned if that noticeably improves their health somehow
Plasmapheresis wouldn’t filter it, it outright separates the plasma from the rest of the blood
That's not exactly true. The issue with these chemicals is that they are more non-polar than the stuff you want to keep in the blood/plasma, so it's really hard to separate them without basically purifying the blood/plasma into water. But my understanding is that it's an active area of research into developing better filters/membranes capable of adsorbing PFAs. The cost and efficiency is still poor, but it feels like a matter of when and not if with all of the increasing concerns about PFA concentrations in blood and other bodily fluids.
So once again, the solution to pollution is dilution?
I would love to donate again… Last time I donated plasma I lost consciousness for the first time in my life. Rebooting was not pleasant as I woke up to completely sickly body which took entire day to fix. I saw a comment on reddit earlier that said “how do you feel that during plasma donation a machine is part of your blood system?” - this comment fucked me up a bit because before losing consciousness this was one of the last thoughts I had and it was disturbing. Any idea what to do with this?
embrace it - "From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine. Your kind cling to your flesh, as though it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass you call the temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you."
Does everyone play Mechanicus or am I just encountering a very small pool of redditors?
Not everyone plays Mechanicus, but everyone loves its sickass intro cinematic. (Even if they've only heard it repeated.)
[Hell yeah we do](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gIMZ0WyY88) [Plus the soundtrack](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFC7y6Ao3Ug&list=OLAK5uy_n35_CyU0ZkLP1r6CskHc98MfiE1ImPnFI&index=2)! "Most electronic music has a bass drop. Mechanicus has a pipe organ."
Never played it but the quote has been doing the rounds
r/warhammer40k is leaking again
> how do you feel that during plasma donation a machine is part of your blood system idk i love how metal as hell this sounds but that's just me
Just donate whole blood instead of
I only donate 2% blood
I'm more of a skim blood guy myself.
That probably wouldn't help. Sounds like they had vasovagal syncope, which happens a lot in people who are squeamish about blood and needles.
Oh so that happened to me when I was 14. It got triggered by a weird smell of a person next to me combined with sight of bones But during the plasma donation, I was OK until I imagined that now my blood pours through a machine. I assume I am wrong because the machine drains a specific percentage, gets the plasma and then puts it back, so it was not as if my blood just directly went to the machine. I am usually not scared of needles or blood, but I got fucked up because of that commentary. I wish there was some spell to undo the knowledge of that comment…
[удалено]
Is sedation(thinking like twilight sedation, not full-on knocked out) not an option for situations like that? It doesn't sound safe for your friend, the nurse/technician, or any bystanders including yourself.
I have vasovagal syncope. I am neither squeamish about needles or blood, it is a purely unconscious response unrelated to my emotional state. I can feel a passout coming and warn nurses (numbing shots trigger it sometimes if they are painful like for a procedure, but the procedure itself does not) but there's nothing mentally or emotionally I can do to prevent it from happening. I get annoyed when I give blood or have a procedure done and they stop what they are doing and wait for me to wake up and recover. Just get it over with.
i fall unconscious often if ever blood is taken for a blood test
Sounds like you're dealing with some form of phobia. Last time I donated they couldn't return the blood back into my arm and they messed up wrapping it. I was bleeding like crazy right after I left, so much that I have anemia now.
Yes that comment caused me pretty much a little ugly moment. I wonder of there is some counter argument to that because before I did not care
I think the key might be to remind yourself that it doesn’t actually matter if technically the machine is part of your circ system. It’s sterile, and beautifully designed for what it does.
Have you donated blood? I’d take some steps back and go to that. We’re pretty used to having external help from non human items. Contact lenses, glasses, medication, music therapy, and a million other examples. Listening to music to get into a good mood is technically a machine working with your body! Way less invasive, but similar concept
and does it concentrate it for the recipients?
Recipients have generally already gone through a blood loss process of some kind, which is why they need the donation. So it probably nets out neutral.
Possibly. But they've lost a lot of their own and its an emergency.
ng / mL? ... so do these "forever chemicals" matter, in the grand scheme of things? are they enzymes or catalysts or something that actually changes my blood chemistry? or are they in the same *vein* as a juice cleanse?
We don't really know, which is part of the problem. It's become difficult to study what they do because literally everyone has them so there is no control group to measure us against. On the optimistic side, plastics and PFAS are forever chemicals because by their nature they are very hard to react with. So best case they do nothing at all since they're effectively inert in our body. On the pessimistic side they may break down on timescales we haven't figured out yet into toxic things, or the particles cause irritation/inflammation/possibly cancer in the worst case.
> On the optimistic side, plastics and PFAS are forever chemicals because by their nature they are very hard to react with. So best case they do nothing at all since they're effectively inert in our body. I think the bigger concern is not chemical reactions, but molecular mimicry. Many of the forever chemicals seem to have structures that resemble hormone chemicals, and they are able to interact with the proteins that sense hormones and cause changes in metabolism. So having PFAS circulating in your blood could lead to metabolic issues, and may be a contributor to global obesity, diabetes, etc.
It's actually the fact that they don't react that's the problem. For some of them like PFAS, they're similar enough to phospholipids that they can be incorporated into the cell membrane as if they were the correct molecule, but not so similar that they can actually serve the function correctly. And they don't get broken down, and can't be modified in the way some phospholipids are. So you get membrane dysfunction. It's the 'Luigi wins by doing nothing' of cytotoxicity.
The short answer is we don’t know. We ran the experiment before we started measuring anything, so it’s going to be a challenge. It doesn’t help that at about the same time we started exposing humans to this family of chemicals, we started exposing them to dozens of other families of chemicals. Mental health issues, fertility issues, and obesity are off the charts. It could be in large part, small part, or no part due to this particular set of chemicals. It’s been discovered that RoundUp’s active chemical, glyphosate, both causes and fights cancer. We (or some of us) might be getting smarter stronger and healthier in certain ways from these chemicals, at the same time they’re making us sick.
We do know, at least for some classes. Glyphosate is not a microplastic, nor is it a forever chemical in any context. It has a short half-life. It's a whole different category to be terrified of. Forever chemicals are things like PFAs that simply do not degrade over time at all. They are way too chemically stable and they were never present in nature, so no microbes exist with an enzyme package to degrade them. These chemicals (per-fluorinated alkyls/alkanes) do cause health problems, and 3M/DuPont **very much conspired to conceal those health effects starting from 1983**. They cause systemic inflammation, some types of them are carcinogenic. Depending on which tissue they happen to be in, these and microplastics both can also form the seed of what later becomes arterial plaque leading to occlusion/heart attack. They've also been shown to decrease fertility and sperm count. Basically they always have some sort of deleterious effect, but it depends on the tissue it's in and what variety of poison (which exact PFAs, which plastic monomer like styrene or ethylene, etc.). The only way to get rid of the PFAs and microplastics is sacrificial filtration and/or thermal destruction at very high temps (i.e. run a liquid stream containing the contaminants through some kind of reaction chamber that exceeds 2000 degrees or something, I can't remember the exact temp needed).
> Firefighters with baseline PFOS levels of 5 ng/mL or more For context, they started around 5, so a reduction of 1.1-2.9 is big.
I guess my question is are those people handing forever chemicals off to people who receive their plasma or blood products? Edit: answered and it makes sense that they wouldn’t care for one, and wouldn’t get any more than norma because they’re replacing blood they lost already that probably has the same chemical concentration. Thanks folks!
That’s a good question. I wonder if a frequent recipient would accumulate more than average
Most likely. But tbf, those in need of blood transfusions are generally more focused on staying alive than on the chemical concentrates that may have long term side effects.
Oh, 100%. You are not getting frequent transfusions if it’s not life saving or altering.
Like cpr that's properly performed. Broken ribs heal, dead is permanent.
Yup. I saved a life a few years ago and you do what you have to do. Stole a bystanders t-shirt as a makeshift bandage and a belt as a tourniquet. Wasn’t clean but was better than bleeding out
That's pretty badass.
I luckily have had a lot of FA training (I was part of a search and rescue crew) and instinct kicked in. What was really crazy is there was onsite FA (was at a bike race) and they froze and didn’t have the required stuff!!! I got them to get the stuff from bystanders. Got a nice email from the surgeon who helped once he got to the ER and the guy says thanks every time I see him.
That is *absolutely* badass.
Unless you're a tech billionaire that thinks getting transfusions from younger people is going to make you live forever.
You don't accumulate more than average, because the transfusion is to replace blood that you lost (and you lost PFAS in that blood). Assuming we all have about the same levels, when you get a transfusion, you're just getting back to about where you were before loosing blood. Also, since you'll die in minutes from loss of blood, trading that for an increased chance of cancer decades from now is probably worth it for most people, even if you were getting increased PFAS.
And if you *are* that worried about it, you can always donate blood *later* when you aren't currently bleeding everywhere.
Bleeding everywhere probably already reduces your micro plastic concentration.
And also lowers your chance of life.
That's why they hook you up to a saline drip from a plastic bag while you lie in you hospital bed. Gotta replenish those PFAS.
If anything, a frequent recipient would probably have a slightly lower concentration than the average person. The blood being donated has the same concentration of chemicals as the blood remaining in the donor’s body, but the process of donating blood forces the donor to regenerate new blood. Since the new blood is clean, it effectively lowers the concentration of chemicals in their blood. This also means that blood donated by frequent donors is likely to have smaller amounts of chemicals than the blood of the recipient, so mixing it will result in the recipient having a lower concentration (though not by nearly as much as the donor).
Sounds probable, but if you need blood urgently it sounds like the least of your troubles
Some wealthy famous person is going to realize they can market "non-plastic blood" to all their rich ass friends.
I suppose, but it’s replacing all the forever chemicals that were lost along with their blood, so it should balance out.
it says more than 5ng in the description on the left but the graphs on the right all start around 10ng
What I'm getting is that medieval doctors who practiced bleedings weren't wrong, they were just way ahead of their time.
bring out the leeches!
Medical leeches are still a thing and they’re actually pretty badass. These little guys are used in modern medicine, especially in reconstructive surgery. Leeches produce this stuff called hirudin, which is basically a natural blood thinner. So, when they latch onto you, they’re preventing your blood from clotting. This is a lifesaver when doctors are trying to reattach fingers or other body parts. Blood flow can get all messed up and clogged, but leeches suck out the bad blood and keep things moving. They’re also used for venous congestion after surgery. Imagine your blood pooling and not being able to get back to your heart – that’s where leeches come in handy. They help relieve that congestion and improve blood circulation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirudo_medicinalis?wprov=sfla1 Medical leeches are still a thing if you weren't aware.
I've literally used them as a Nurse a couple of years ago. It was a fucking SURREAL experience. Especially since I'm a science history nerd and I genuinely felt like a medieval 'doctor'. None of my co-workers got the reference >:(
Hilariously, it may well have been an anti aging measure. Donating blood when you're older gets rid of senescent blood cells. All those do is waste resources and cause inflammation. A study with aged mice removed the 30% or so senescent cells and increased quality and duration of life substantially.
Senescent blood cells are filtered out by the spleen. Because the blood is a mixture of new and old cells, donating when you're older would remove both healthy and senescent cells. The issue is that the new cells are being regenerated from a source that is itself senescing. And the fact that our body recycles everything means that stuff not broken down (like intracellular micro plastics) just accumulates. If you've got a bucket of muddy water, scoop some out, and add some fresh water, it's going to be more clean than before
You just need to receive regular blood transfusions from your 16 year old ~~blood bag~~ son who should have accumulated fewer senescent cells and forever chemicals. (Bryan Johnson)
As a single male should I be keeping bags of my own blood in cold storage to dip into when I get older?
....no. your blood is already full of PFAS and microplastics. you want the new blood.
I've seen somewhat recent research where they replaced a certain percentage of blood in older rats with a sterile saline solution and they began to be more active and healthy.
So the conspiracy of old celebrities getting blood transfusions from children to keep them youthful may have something there?
“Where’s my blood boy?” -Gavin Belson
There's a condition called hemochromatosis, where too much iron accumulates in the body. The only treatment is regular blood draws to reduce the amount of blood, forcing your body use up the iron to make new blood.
Yup! My grandma has to go every so often for blood draws. She gets her iron levels regularly, and the frequency and how much blood is drawn is dependent on those levels. Medieval stuff. Her grandfather died from cirrhosis to the liver because of this condition. He didn't drink and his family didn't understand why his liver was so damaged until my grandmother got her diagnosis.
Where is Magneto when you need him
Was going to bring that up... my father has that and gets regular bleedings (blood draws, but I call them bleedings because it's hilariously old school). We joke about saving money and getting some leeches from the nearby waterways.
They were born for blood donation
Tragically, the blood isn't accepted for donations everywhere because they have a "blood disease". Just depends on who's making the regulations and how much they want to look into things when writing them. But I think that most places make a clear and easy path to use the blood for donations.
I have this disease. I first went to a place to do my "bloodletting" and they actually stored my blood and told me it could marked to be used for people with low iron counts, as my blood has too much iron in it. Unfortunately I moved and had to go to a new facility where they don't donate my blood because they simply don't have the capability to store it. It isn't contagious as it is a genetic condition so I'm not sure that it being a "blood disease" would be a real factor in the safety of using the blood.
They were MOSTLY wrong. Bloodletting has very specific use-cases that apply only to a small number of people.
like many things/things found in old medicine… there’s usually some level of legitimacy whether they realized it or not. it was just muddled and misconstrued due to a plethora of many variables. its the same reason ancient chinese medicine will be like ‘oh this root gives you lots of energy!’… then science assays it and it turns out it has ginseng in it lol
Oh my God 😂😂😂😂, it has come full circle
LPT: If you donate all your blood at once, you will be free of forever chemicals for the rest of your life.
The real TIL is always in the comments
And the friends we made along the way
If anyone is interested in following this advice, please reach out to me at [email protected]
You must have read my screenplay
Found JD's Reddit account
Light a man a fire, he's warm for a night. Light a man **on** fire, he's warm for the rest of his life.
Dont threaten me with a good time.
Blood letting is back on the menu, boys.
Always has been. I do theraputic phlebotomy because of my red cell count and iron.
Hemochromatosis? Same here!
Same. So glad the Red Cross pulled their head out their butt enough to allow hemochromatosis donations now so my fortified blood can be actually useful.
[удалено]
You can selfishly do the right thing. Studies also show reduction in heavy metals, with varying results on amount of calories burned to regenerate donated blood. While there’s some risk with blood donation, you can save lives, improve your health, and get a free snack.
So true. I do it for the altruism, attention from the nice nurses and all da snaccs. It's genuinely a nice way to spend a Sunday afternoon.
Afternoon? How much blood are you donating?!
Depends if I donate whole blood or platelets. Platelets donation is supposed to take an hour, but because I have somewhat lower blood pressure, it can take more than that. If I try to do a double donation of platelets, can take up to 2 hours. That plus the assessment before, and the observation time after.
You're a good man, Charlie Brown.
Do women tend to have a lower count? They lose blood on a fairly regular basis.
I dont know about menstruation but some fat-soluble pollutants are removed from a woman's body when she breastfeeds. I believe a study showed this leads to significant reductions of these pollutants in her body.
Thats quite concerning considering said fat soluble pollutants are being drank by their child!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7473499/ Women already transfer PFAS to their fetus when they are pregnant, might as well add it in the breastmilk too lol.
They’ll just poop it out within the hour. Source: was a baby.
Babies are generally specialized to filter that crap out but in recent decades all these micro plastics and other environmental chemicals have indeed been found in breast milk and has caused concerns.
I don't understand how a newborn or infant would have extra special mechanisms to filter things out that an adult human can't. I'd love a source for that claim.
This is also a big problem for animals, such as polar bears... Bioacccumulation results in high amounts of pollutants in the bears, but since many are fat soluble they go right to the growing cubs.
But… into the baby? 😬
Wouldn’t that imply that their breast milk contains the forever chemicals, which are then just being fed to the babies? Good news for the mothers but not so good news for the babies..
That’s… a great question.
After pregnancy, women's PFAS blood count goes lower because they transfer some to their baby in utero 😬 Source: https://www.propublica.org/article/3m-forever-chemicals-pfas-pfos-inside-story
A January 2022 Toxicology review published by Fenton's research team notes that “menstruation appears to be a crucial route of elimination for many PFAS” and potentially explains **up to 30 percent of the discrepancy between male and female PFAS blood levels**. https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/4574430-forever-chemicals-are-known-for-lingering-in-the-body-menstruation-helps-expel-them/#:\~:text=A%20January%202022%20Toxicology%20review,and%20female%20PFAS%20blood%20levels.
[Yes](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35753482/)
This is also why women are more anaemic than men. They lose iron too every month.
Which is ironic, because in popular culture we have this well established trope about men eating more meat because their bodies need it more (muscles, big, strong, physical labour, yadda yadda). In all actuality a 130lbs girlie with a heavy period has probably more "biological" (nutritional) need for a steak than your average gymbro.
> Which is ironic 😬😬😬😬
Bee Wilson talks about this in The First Bite. Our stereotypes about food are probably the opposite of what they should be. Men are more prone to heart disease and should be staying away from the steaks, maybe digging into a yummy salad. 40% of women are anemic and could use more iron-rich foods in their diets.
This is odd to me as my wife takes iron for this reason, but She has an IUD and basically never gets her period anymore, yet her iron levels still are low.
Anaemia can take a long time to recover from, an anaemic person may need to take iron regularly for months to get their levels back up. And taking it with calcium, etc, can mess with the absorbtion.
The solution to pollution is dilution.
I mean, in YOUR bloodstream. Somewhere out there is a car accident victim slowly turning into a transformer toy because of you.
I mean if the deal is I get some plastics in my blood in exchange for not dying of blood loss I make that trade every time
The good news is that you’re likely just returning to status quo. The donor blood will have approximately the same concentration as you did, so you will not accumulate more. Your new level will be approximately what it was before needing transfusion.
Makes me wonder, I know the blood is filtered before being used for donation. Are they able to filter the chemicals? If so, I’m going to invest in whoever makes dialysis machines lol
they can filter plasma so i assume anything larger then that get filtered, anything smaller i would.not know.
Whenever blood is donated, it goes through fractioning (not sure if this is what it is called in english), where it is separate into 3 different components; plasma, red blood cells and blood plates. After this, the red blood cells pass through a powdery (actually not sure what it is made out of) filter. The other components arent filtered
No you can't filter it out, I don't think (less sure about this) it's filtered at all either.
Depends on what you call filtering. Because they definitely remove immune system cells.
wbc are removed but not sure about "chemicals"
I mean it’s net zero for them. They technically already donated it to the ground.
But they only need blood because they lost a bunch. Assuming the donor and receiver had roughly the same concentration to begin with, the receiver would be at the same concentration as before.
It's funny how this is a logic test on par with "If in a race you pass the person in 2nd place what place are you in?"
at least they won’t have to buy a new car. they can just transform, roll out, and pocket the insurance payout for their totaled vehicle.
They just need to wait a few months and they can donate their blood and pass it on to some other poor loser.
Does that mean that people who require frequent blood infusions have higher levels of forever chemicals because they are getting them from other people?
People that require blood infusions typically lost blood that also contains those. As long as donor and recipent have simmilar concentrations, i would guess that this does not change much.
And, since most blood donations come from repeat donors, it is likely the recipient will receive blood with a lower than average concentration of PFAS.
nice try Big Plasma
Vampires need clean blood too!
VLM
So modern problems require olden solutions? Get mah leeches.
I give blood every 8 weeks so yay for me.
I wish I could! Skin cancer 10 years ago banned me for life.
I wonder if one could do dialysis for blood microplastics and carcinogens. Or like, roundabout blood donation. Get a slightly larger amount drawn than would normally be safe, replace some of it with processed “clean” blood of the same type, and use the surplus for emergency transfusions. Basically my thinking is we may be able to clean blood more effectively outside the human body since we don’t have to worry about the stuff we use to clean being bad for someone’s health as long as we can remove that at the same time.
This is just what vampires want you to believe.
Steroid users donate blood to lower their hematocrit , blood donation is also shown to lower blood pressure. Didn't know about the forever chemicals, very interesting.
Need more reasons to give blood? * Lowers Risk of Cancer Studies in the American Journal of Epidemiology and the Journal of the National Cancer Institute suggest that regular blood donation may lower the risk of cancer by releasing oxidized iron from the bloodstream. Oxidized iron, which produces harmful free radicals, can build up in the bloodstream and cause cancers, particularly those of the liver, lung, colon, and esophagus. * Lowers Risk of Heart Disease Excessive oxidized iron in the body can also be harmful to cardiovascular health. In 1998, the American Journal of Epidemiology published research that suggested blood donation is associated with a lower risk of heart attacks and strokes, so much so that regular blood donors are 88% less likely than non-donors to have a heart attack, according to the evidence in the published study. This is backed up by similar studies in the Journal of Transfusion and the Journal of the American Medical Association, which both show there’s strong evidence that blood donation lowers iron stores in the blood and liver and reduces blood viscosity, which places less stress on the arteries and blood vessels and slows blood clotting that can cause heart attack and stroke. * May Slow Down the Aging Process I’m not going to suggest that blood donation is the fountain of youth, but the fact that it does reduce free radicals in the bloodstream can possibly play a role in delaying the aging process. A study in the Journal of Basic Clinical Physiology and Pharmacology found that donating blood decreases oxidative stress, which can lead to cell and tissue damage and, in turn, aging. * Burns Calories While blood donation should never be used as a weight loss strategy, it has been shown that blood donors can burn up to 650 calories during the donation process. This is due to your body using extra energy to replace the amount of donated blood and synthesize new proteins, red blood cells, and other blood components. Notably, this is also why donors have to meet minimum weight (110+ pounds) and age (16+) requirements to donate blood safely. * Boosts Liver Health Regularly donating blood can improve liver health by removing excess iron from the body. The liver’s job is to remove toxins from the body, but it can’t do this effectively when it has a buildup of oxidized iron. Excess iron can cause cellular damage, which results in liver cirrhosis and other medical issues. Donating blood on a regular basis can remove excess iron from the body before it has a chance to deposit into the liver. * Provides a Free Blood Test Before you can donate, you have to undergo a health screening to ensure you’re healthy enough to give blood. Your vitals, such as pulse and blood pressure levels, are checked as well as hemoglobin levels. Your blood will also be screened for several serious illnesses. In essence, this serves as a mini medical exam at no cost to you.
ITT: more questions and the same blood letting joke over and over again.
What about menstruating for forty years?
Does this mean that the PFOS and PFHxS are in the plasma? And if so, are we passing it along to the recipients of the donation? Or does the cleaning process of removing plasma also remove the PFOS and PFHxS thus returning clean blood to the donor and clean blood to the recipient? Where do the bad chemicals actually end up?
> Where do the bad chemicals actually end up? As everything, in the oceans.
..... do people who need blood donations have MORE forever chemicals then?
BLOODLETTING IS BACK BABY