Silver metal particles themselves aren’t terribly likely to make it from the GI tract to the blood, but when they’re transformed into a salt, they’re ushered right through.įrom there, Hurt and his team showed that silver ions bind easily with sulfur present in blood proteins, which would give them a free ride through the bloodstream. Those ions can easily be taken into the bloodstream through channels that absorb other types of salt. Corrosion strips silver atoms of electrons, forming positively charged silver salt ions. They found that nanosilver corrodes in stomach acid in much the same way it does in other acidic environments. One treatment simulated the acidic environment in the gastrointestinal tract one mimicked the protein content of the bloodstream and a collagen gel replicated the base membranes of the skin. To find out, the researchers mixed a series chemical treatments that could simulate what might happen to silver inside the body. Hurt’s graduate student, Jingyu Liu (now a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology), thought those same toxic ions might also be produced when silver enters the body, and could play a role in argyria. They’ve found that nanosilver tends to corrode in acidic environments, giving off charged ions - silver salts - that can be toxic in large amounts. Hurt and his team have been studying the environmental impact of silver, specifically silver nanoparticles, for years. That final stage, oddly, involves the same photochemical reaction used to develop black-and-white photographs. Robert Hurt “The particles someone ingests aren’t the particles that ultimately cause the disorder.”Hurt and his team show that nanosilver is broken down in the stomach, absorbed into the bloodstream as a salt and finally deposited in the skin, where exposure to light turns the salt back into elemental silver and creates the telltale bluish hue. His paper on the subject, authored with Brown colleagues Jingyu Liu, Zhongying Wang, Frances Liu, and Agnes Kane, is published in the journal ACS Nano. Tissue samples from patients showed silver particles actually lodged deep in the skin, but it wasn’t clear how they got there.Īs it turns out, argyria is caused by a complex series of chemical reactions, Hurt said. The condition has been documented in people who (ill advisedly) drink antimicrobial health tonics containing silver nanoparticles and in people who have had extensive medical treatments involving silver. Scientists have known for years argyria had something to do with silver. “What’s interesting here is that the particles someone ingests aren’t the particles that ultimately cause the disorder.” “It’s the first conceptual model giving the whole picture of how one develops this condition,” said Robert Hurt, professor of engineering at Brown and part of the research team. Researchers from Brown University have shown for the first time how ingesting too much silver can cause argyria, a rare condition in which patients’ skin turns a striking shade of grayish blue.
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