High
Omega-3 Fatty Acid, Fish Intake Reduces CHD, Sudden Death Risk
Omega-3
fatty acid intake is shown to be associated with reduced risk of
coronary heart disease (CHD) in women, and of sudden death in men,
in two new reports released last week.
In
the first study, in the April 10th issue of The Journal of the
American Medical Association, Dr. Frank B. Hu, from the Harvard
School of Public Health, Boston, and colleagues collected dietary
data on 84,688 women who participated in the Nurses' Health Study.
These women were 34 to 59 years of age, and free from CHD at
baseline in 1980.
Over
16 years of follow-up, there were 484 were deaths from CHD and
1029 nonfatal MIs, the researchers found.. Multivariate analysis
showed that women who ate fish once per week had a relative risk
for CHD of 0.71, for those eating fish two to four times per week
the relative risk was 0.69, and for women who ate fish five or
more time per week it was 0.66 (p for trend = 0.001), Dr. Hu's
team reports.
According
to the authors, women who had a higher intake of omega-3 fatty
acid also had a lower risk of CHD.
Dr.
Hu and colleagues conclude that "this prospective study
provides strong evidence for an inverse association between fish
and omega-3 fatty acid consumption and risk of CHD in women,
particularly CHD death."
The
second study, an early release from the April 11th issue of The
New England Journal of Medicine, is a nested case-control analysis
of men who participated in the Physicians' Health Study.
Dr.
Christine M. Albert, from Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston,
and colleagues analyzed previously collected blood from 94 men for
whom sudden death was the first sign of cardiovascular disease.
They compared these samples with 184 matched controls.
According
to the report, the adjusted relative risk for sudden death was
0.28 among men who had concentrations of long-chain n-3 fatty acid
in the third quartile and 0.19 for men in the fourth quartile,
compared with men in the lowest quartile.
Dr.
Albert and colleagues conclude that "if the observed
association is causal, increasing the intake of n-3 fatty acids by
eating more fish or by taking supplements is an intervention that
could be applied to this segment of the population at low cost and
little risk."
The
results from these studies mirror a recent report by Italian
researchers, which found that supplemental n-3 polyunsaturated
acids reduced mortality after MI.
JAMA
2002;287:1815-1821. N Engl J Med 2002;346:1102-1103,1113-1118.
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