Fish Oil

It’s finally here. The results of the REDUCE-IT trial were presented today at the American Heart Association conference and the paper is also up on The New England Journal of Medicine. I’ve been excited to see the results of this trial ever since the announcement in September (which I wrote about here) so let’s get right into it. I’ll just copy and paste what I’d written before in September regarding the inclusion/criteria and statistical analyses so that I can get right into the results. Read More

With the exception of this past week, it hasn’t been a very good year for fish oil. In early 2018, a large meta-analysis and systematic review of several randomized trials was published in JAMA. This large pooled analysis (77,000 + participants) assessed the impact of supplementing fish oil on cardiovascular disease events and found that there was no statistically significant effect (p=.10). The relative risks (RR) and coverage of the confidence intervals (CI) also suggested a very small effect (RR: 0. Read More

Fish oil supplements and cardiovascular disease have had a long and controversial history. There was a lot of inconsistency in the research around supplementation and several organizations only added to this confusion. The incomplete reporting by media outlets have also confused the public. Here, I’ll give a brief timeline of the evidence for fish oil and CVD outcomes. 1970s | A group of explorers noticed that people who consumed fish also had lower incidences of heart disease. Read More