PFAS Now, IBS/IBD Later?

This is Dr. Manasi Agrawal. She’s a Professor of Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and a gastroenterologist at the Mount Sinai Hospital, with focus in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). She’s also the Director of Environmental Gastroenterology, and as such her research focuses on the role of the environment on IBD risk, towards disease prediction and prevention.

What does she want us to know?

Some of her research has shown d an association between higher concentrations of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) (also called “forever* chemicals”) and increased odds of developing IBD years later, and her latest study will measure all detectable PFAS chemicals to better represent the complex exposures people experience in everyday life, as opposed to in lab settings.

^{*This is because they have been made specifically to avoid degradation of industrial and chemical products. Which is great for providing stain and water resistance, but not so great for our bodies or the environment.}

Bearing in mind! There were some huge flaws with some microplastics studies, such as those highlighted in: Avoiding and reducing microplastic false positives from dry glove contact

…whereby the gloves used by scientists to avoid contaminating samples were, themselves, the source of the contamination.

So, there are things that need to be tested carefully, such as:

• Whether individual PFAS chemicals and PFAS mixtures are associated with future IBD risk and complications at diagnosis
• Whether PFAS exposure is associated with changes in blood glycosylation patterns before IBD develops
• Whether changes in glycosylation are associated with future development of Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis
• How PFAS exposure affects the intestinal glycocalyx, glycosylation, and intestinal inflammation in laboratory models

In this case, as Dr. Agrwal puts it:

❝Our goal is to better understand how environmental exposures may influence the earliest stages of inflammatory bowel disease. By studying PFAS exposure and the biological changes that occur years before diagnosis, we hope to uncover mechanisms that could help identify individuals at risk and ultimately inform prevention strategies and more personalized approaches to care❞

You can read more about how she’s been going about this, here: Per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) exposure is associated with later occurrence of inflammatory bowel disease

What to do meanwhile?

For more practical advice, you might want to check out our previous writings on the topic, for example:

• We Are Such Stuff As Bottles Are Made Of
• PFAS Exposure & Cancer: The Numbers Are High
• Are You Inhaling Microplastics In Your House?
• The “Forever Chemicals” That Can Triple The Risk Of Liver Disease
• Microplastics Now, Alzheimer’s/Parkinson’s Later?

Want to learn more?

For a much deeper dive into the broader topic of avoiding the toxins the industrial world is keen to throw our way, you might like this book that we reviewed a little while back:

Healthy Living in a Contaminated World – by Dr. Donald Hoernschemeyer

Want to learn less?

If reading entire books isn’t your thing, then you might prefer this:

Here’s a List of Products with PFAS (& How to Avoid Them)

Take care!