Your takeaway container, your blood pressure: Monash opens Australia’s first national survey on plastics and the heart

How much plastic touches your life in a day, and is it doing anything to your heart? A team at Monash University’s Victorian Heart Institute wants Australians to help answer that, through a national survey that opened this week.

The Plastic Heart Study will map where people come into contact with plastics, from food packaging to household products, and set that against their blood pressure. High blood pressure is one of the biggest risk factors for heart attack and stroke, and the researchers want to know whether the people with the most plastic in their daily lives are also the ones with higher readings.

Principal investigator Professor Francine Marques said the study will fill major gaps in understanding how Australians are being exposed to plastics.

How does the survey work?

Participants need a blood pressure reading taken up to seven days before they start, at home with a monitor or at a pharmacy or GP. The survey then asks about their heart health and the materials they regularly handle, eat from and live with.

Two to three days after finishing it, each participant receives feedback on their blood pressure, their diet and practical ways to reduce their exposure to plastics. The survey is online at redcap.link/plasticheart and the study is funded by Monash University.

Study coordinator Madoka Lelliott said plastics can get into the body three ways in everyday life: by swallowing, breathing and through the skin.

What does the science already say?

Enough to worry, not enough to prove harm. The study that put plastics and the heart on the map came in 2024, in the New England Journal of Medicine. Italian researchers examined fatty plaque removed from the neck arteries of patients having surgery and found tiny plastic particles in more than half of them. Over the next three years or so, patients whose plaque held plastic were about four and a half times as likely to have a heart attack or stroke, or to die, as those whose plaque did not.

That was a striking result, but it showed an association, not a cause. Patients with plastic in their arteries may have differed in other ways, such as smoking, diet or income, that also affect heart risk, and the study involved a few hundred people with existing artery disease, not the general population.

Laboratory work has suggested ways plastics and the chemicals added to them could affect the body, including inflammation and changes to hormones and blood vessels. What is missing is good evidence from ordinary people living ordinary lives, and that is the gap the Monash team is aiming at.

What will this study not tell us?

A survey can show whether two things go together; it cannot show that one causes the other. People who use more takeaway packaging, for example, may also eat more salt, which raises blood pressure on its own. The researchers will need to untangle those overlaps before drawing conclusions, and any link they find would need to be tested in further studies.

Why does it matter to you?

Plastic is close to impossible to avoid. It wraps most supermarket food, lines many cans and cups, sheds from synthetic clothing and carpets, and turns up in household dust. If everyday exposure does nudge blood pressure up, even slightly, the effect across a whole population could be large, because about one in three Australian adults already has high blood pressure, and many do not know it.

For now, there is no official Australian guidance telling people to avoid plastics for heart health. Anyone worried about their blood pressure should have it checked and talk to their doctor.