Unlike most other supplements, fish oil has been rigorously studied, said Dr. JoAnn Manson, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. But the results of these studies have been mixed, leaving researchers and doctors still debating whether fish oil is beneficial for heart health. They also found that taking fish oil was associated with a slightly higher risk of developing atrial fibrillation, a type of irregular heartbeat.
Here’s where the evidence for the benefits and risks of fish oil stands today.
A boatload of studies but unclear benefits
After reading the submissions from Greenland, researchers began looking at people elsewhere in the world and found, in study after study, that those who ate fish at least once a week were less likely to die of coronary heart disease than those who rarely ate it. fish. In animal experiments, they found that fish oil helped the electrical signals in heart cells work properly, said Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and director of the Food is Medicine Institute at Tufts University.
“There was a lot of excitement” about those findings, Dr. Christine Albert, chair of the cardiology department at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. And it was natural to hope that people might be able to reap the same benefits from taking fish oil in supplement form, she added.
But most clinical trials of fish oil capsules have not reported reductions in deaths from heart disease or in total cardiovascular events such as heart attack and stroke. That was the finding of a 2018 meta-analysis that combined the results of 10 omega-3 trials involving nearly 78,000 people. Similarly, researchers reported no overall heart health benefits from omega-3 in a 2018 trial of more than 15,000 adults with type 2 diabetes followed for an average of seven years; in a 2019 trial of more than 25,000 adults 50 and older followed for an average of five years; and in a 2020 trial of a high-dose omega-3 tested in more than 13,000 people at risk of cardiovascular disease.
“One after another of these studies showed absolutely no benefit,” said Dr. Steven Nissen, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, who led the 2020 trial. (One trial, published in 2018, showed a striking benefit of a high dose of omega-3 EPA. But it has been widely criticized for using the oil mineral, which can increase the risk of heart disease, as placebo, Dr. Nissen said.)
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