BPA sends false signals to female hearts
More on harmful effects of BPA, a common accidental ingredient in many foods stored in plastic or in cans with special lines (as with canned tomato products). Janet Raloff reports in Science News:
Bisphenol A toys with the female heart, a new study finds. And under the right conditions, its authors worry, this near-ubiquitous pollutant might even prove deadly.
BPA is a building block of clear hard plastics, dental sealants and the resins lining food cans. Studies have shown that throughout the industrial world, nearly everyone regularly encounters the compound, albeit at trace concentrations.
That’s small consolation, says Laura Vandenberg of Tufts University in Medford, Mass.: In the new BPA study, “the most effective dose was very close to — if not completely overlapping — what’s been reported in humans,” she says.
Parts-per-trillion concentrations of BPA triggered heart-muscle cells to begin beating to their own internal drummers. These cells should instead hold off beating until they receive signals from a central pacemaker, explains Hong-Sheng Wang of the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, whose team conducted the new study. The resulting arrhythmia, known as fibrillation, caused by unsynchronized beating can trigger sudden cardiac death, Wang says.
BPA mimics the hormone estrogen in the body. In 2009, the Cincinnati team showed that both estrogen and BPA could alter contraction rates in heart cells — but only those from female animals. The researchers recently linked this finding to estrogen’s effect on calcium, which plays a pivotal role in heart-cell contractions. Both estrogen and BPA — especially together — fostered a leakiness of calcium within female heart cells, the team reported in the Sept. 27 PLoS ONE.
Those researchers have now linked this gender-specific effect to . . .
Continue reading. The FDA currently has no problems with BPA, but under pressure they are beginning to investigate. I believe that the EU has long since taken action on this.
