It seems I hear ads every day, touting the benefits of fish oil. Some icelandic gal claims that taking a few fish oil capsules a day will recue arthritis, lower blood pressure, reduce joint stiffness, etc. My question: has anyone ever PROVEN these claims? Or is this just another “snake oil” scam?
A couple of years ago, the health-care agency I work for did a number of evidence reports (that is, reviews of clinical studies cited in medical journals) on the effects of omega-3 fatty acids on asthma, cancer, cardiovascular disease and risk factors, type II diabetes, mental health and cognitive functions, organ transplantation, and other conditions. You can find the full set listed at Clinical Guidelines and Recommendations | Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
Basically, there aren’t enough good-quality studies to draw any definite conclusions. The only one of these health conditions that looks to be improved by omega-3 fatty acids are cardiovascular disease and risk factors, and even those are inconclusive.
ETA: I’m not a doctor or health-care researcher, just the Web geek who posts these things on the site.
There have been studies that appear to demonstrate an improvement in cognitive skills and behaviour in children given Omega-3 supplements and others that suggest they help in cases of Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia and other similar conditions.
Here’s an article that mentions a clinical study, but not in quite enough detail
-There’s a lot of this sort of article out there - apparently the studies have been done, the results appear positive, but for some reason, nobody has yet stated a definitive conclusion.
-But it’s worth noting that this might not be a case of ‘extra makes you better’, as it may be simple correction of a deficiency.
Anecdotally(Yeah, I know): I put both my kids on fish oil supplements about a year ago and in this time, my daughter has advanced literally from near the bottom of her class to a level beyond the expected attainment for her yeargroup - to the genuine surprise of all her teachers. Of course plenty of other factors may have been in play, but I’m not going to rush to pooh-pooh the Omega-3 thing.
I’m afraid you’ve been had by the BBC’s lousy science reporting, Mangetout; the Durham “study” was just about the least scientific exercise it’s possible to imagine. No blinding, no control group, no data released (indeed, despite repeated requests for raw data under Freedom of Information laws, the organisers refused to provide any). The organisers have stopped referring to it as a “trial”, since that term has specific and rigourous technical connotations. The reason that the article you linked to is vague is because there’s little more concrete for them to cite.
For (extremely) full coverage on the absolute sham that is the Durham program, I refer anyone interested to Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science website, where this particular instance of bad science has become something of a cause celebre.
This is not to say that Omega 3 doesn’t have positive effects, of course, but the Durham experiment should not satisfy anyone looking for evidence that they do.
Edit: I’m also not having a go at your giving your daughter pills; just contesting the scientific credentials of the Durham study.
That’s interesting, because the BBC page explicitly states it was a double-blind trial (not that this means it was, of course)
The research runs both ways, but as mentioned upthread, one of the issues appears to be that more does not equal better. It appears that too much or too little can be a problem. There are some studies on mood regulation that I don’t have time to dig up right now. Random assortment of first-page studies on Medscape (free subscription may be required:
CNN reports that it helps reduce blood pressure.
This appears to be a rather large distortion on the part of the Durham people; the large-scale “trial” has no placebo group, is not blinded and is not randomised (hence my use of scare quotes around “trial”). The Equazen bunch (the larger study is sponsored by Equazen, a fish-oil manufacturer) seem to have laid claim to a smaller-scale dyspraxia study done on a much smaller cohort by some Oxford researchers in collaboration with Durham council. The researcher primarily responsible for the large-scale test, Madeleine Portwood, had nothing to do with this, and seems to be using it as a respectable fig-leaf for her study’s complete lack of both standards and accessible data.
More info in this article.
That’s really disappointing, not least because I don’t think it’s all that unlikely that genuinely positive results are possible from honest, rigorous trials - this might actually be something that does work.