Common chemicals in plastic linked to over 350,000 deaths from heart disease

Researchers estimate that exposure to phthalates contributes to 13 percent of all heart disease deaths in people between ages 55 and 64 each year worldwide.

A set of chemicals found in food packaging, plastics, and lotions and shampoos has been linked to hundreds of thousands of deaths from heart disease, according to a study published Tuesday in the journal eBioMedicine.

These chemicals, known as phthalates (pronounced tha-lates), were responsible for more than 350,000 deaths worldwide in 2018, researchers found. About 75 percent of the deaths were in Asia, the Middle East and the Pacific — reflecting growing concern about the amount of plastic proliferating in developing countries.

“We think of plastics as an issue in high-income countries,” said Leonardo Trasande, a professor at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine and one of the authors of the paper. “But what we’re seeing in the pattern geographically is disturbing.”

While the researchers acknowledge that exposure to phthalates coincides with other risk factors — such as obesity and metabolic disorders — the findings add to the growing evidence that chemicals used in plastics come with serious health risks.

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