Omega-3 Fats May Improve Health in the Elderly
Written By: Greg Arnold, DC, CSCS - American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
Print
Email
Published - Sep 16, 2008
Known to be “essential in human nutrition”, omega-3 fatty acids (O3FA) first gained attention from the medical community when they observed the low frequency of coronary heart disease among Eskimos exposed to a diet rich in fish. While O3FA “favorably modulate many diseases”, they have the greatest benefit for heart health but also benefit mental health, lung health, colon health, skin health, eye health, infant brain health and even weight loss.
Now a new study has found that at least one in four elderly can benefit from O3FA supplementation and help with survival. Researchers selected 254 patients from a hospital in Norway with an average age of 82. They all had at least one mental or physical condition used in previous research that included chronic disability, vision/hearing, impairment, depression, malnutrition, mild or moderate dementia, and polypharmacy (taking at least 5 drugs per day). Their blood samples were taken to measure for blood levels of 22 different fatty acids including EPA, a fat found in fish oil.
The researchers found that of the 22 fatty acids tested, “EPA was the only fatty acid significantly associated with risk of death in this population.” After three years, deaths in the low-EPA group were 33% higher than the high-EPA group (55 vs. 46 deaths) and overall survival rate was nearly one year longer in the high-EPA group (2.4 years vs. 1.5 years).
This added up to a 48% lower risk of all-cause mortality for those in the upper 75% of EPA blood levels compared to the lowest 25%, showing that there is a threshold with EPA and the risk of death. While heart disease was the number one cause of death in both the high- and low-EPA groups, 20.6% (13 cases among 63 patients) of the low-EPA patients were diagnosed with heart disease compared to only 12.6% (24 cases among 191 patients) in the high-EPA group.
For the researchers, “overall mortality in frail, elderly, acutely sick patients was inversely and non-linearly associated with EPA concentrations” and that “approximately 25% of the population had EPA concentrations below the indicated threshold for maximal protection, suggesting that only this part of the population might have benefited from additional EPA intake.”
By Greg Arnold, DC, CSCS, September 17, 2008, abstracted from “Long-chain n_3 fatty acids and mortality in elderly patients“ in the issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.