By Adam Marcus
NEW YORK |
Tue Jan 1, 2013 10:25am EST
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Sorry, Charlie, though fish oil supplements did not forestall atrial fibrillation in patients who had already gifted episodes of a heart cadence malfunction, a new clinical hearing has found.
The study, published in a Journal of a American College of Cardiology, adds to a flourishing pool of unsatisfactory justification per a protecting effects of omega-3 greasy acids on heart health.
“The formula for atrial fibrillation are critical disastrous findings, responding pivotal clinical and investigate questions,” pronounced Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, an omega-3 consultant during a Harvard School of Public Health, who was not concerned in a stream study.
The new research, total with other trials, “indicates that short-term fish oil use is doubtful to forestall memorable atrial fibrillation,” he said.
But if a supplements don’t forestall heart cadence problems, they don’t seem to be dangerous, either. “In all these studies, fish oil was protected and well-tolerated, with no justification for increasing bleeding,” Mozaffarian told Reuters Health.
Atrial fibrillation, in that a heart’s top chambers kick out of step with those below, affects scarcely one in 10 Americans in their 80s. The condition is related to potentially life-threatening strokes and heart failure.
Although doctors allot certain drugs to provide a condition, nothing to date has proven quite effective. As a result, many drug diagnosis focuses on preventing strokes by administering blood thinners to disintegrate clots caused by a fibrillation.
Some justification suggests that omega-3 greasy acids, found in greasy fish like sardines and tuna, competence revoke a risk of atrial fibrillation, nonetheless accurately how they would furnish their outcome is not clear.
A investigate published progressing this year in Circulation, for example, found that people with a many omega-3s in their blood had a 30 percent revoke possibility of building an strange heart kick than those with a lowest concentrations of a substances (see Reuters Health story of Feb 1, 2012).
That 30 percent disproportion would work out to 8 fewer cases of atrial fibrillation per 100 people – that would be a suggestive advantage if it could be enjoyed by those with fibrillation or during risk for it, only by immoderate some-more omega 3s.
But a latest investigate suggests that it substantially can’t. The hearing enclosed 586 group and women with a story of atrial fibrillation who were given a gram a day of fish oil or manikin capsules for a year. Participants also were authorised to take other drugs to control their heart rhythms, as prescribed by their doctors.
At a finish of a investigate period, about 24 percent of a people who took fish oil, and 20 percent of those who did not, had gifted a regularity of atrial fibrillation – a disproportion so small, statistically, it was expected due to chance.
The supplements also did not seem to revoke a risk of other cardiovascular ailments – including stroke, heart attack, heart disaster – or genocide from any cause.
The commentary on atrial fibrillation relate formula from a investigate led by Mozaffarian published in November, of patients recuperating from heart surgery.
Even so, Dr. Alejandro Macchia, a cardiologist during a GESICA Foundation in Buenos Aires, who led a stream investigate and collaborated with Mozaffarian on a prior one, pronounced fish oil might still infer profitable for heart health, during slightest in some patients.
“I am not certain a story is over,” Dr. Macchia told Reuters Health. “I consider we have adequate justification to contend that there is no purpose of (omega-3 greasy acids) for a impediment of atrial fibrillation” in patients with a story of a condition, he said. “However in a context of primary impediment – those people who had never had a prior part of atrial fibrillation – there is a reasonable room for a well-designed and really vast clinical trial.”
SOURCE: bit.ly/VrTKiY Journal of a American College of Cardiology, online Dec 19, 2012.