Roy: Sudden heart attacks and death

Two fathers of children at my son's school died suddenly in the last three weeks. Both were in their forties (like me), both appeared to be fit and healthy, one had run the chicago marathon last year and both just died suddenly of heart attacks, leaving wives with young children. It sure makes you think........

When I mentioned this to my colleagues, instead of sympathy, they replied rather aggressively - "were they taking our omega-3 fish oil?". I had actually given our website address to one of them but not yet to the other and so I hadn't done much. I let them and their families down, because I know that their risk of death would have decreased by more than 25% if they had been taking Pharmaomega.

The American Medical Association (the association to which more than half of all US doctors belong) published a paper in 2005 stating that when it comes to avoiding death from heart attack and stroke, Omega-3s are more effective than any other treatment, in fact, almost twice as effective as statin drugs. To draw these conclusions, scientists evaluated 97 studies involving over 250,000 people. Omega-3s reduced risk of overall mortality by 23% and statins reduced risk by 13%. Omega-3s were even more impressive in people with heart disease (like those two dads and anyone else with high cholesterol). In those people, omega-3s reduced risk of cardiac mortality by 32% compared to 22% for statins.

In addition, recent studies have shown that if you are already taking a statin you get further benefits by also taking highly purified and concentrated fish oil:

In a study of more than 18,000 patients who were all taking statins, half were given 1800 mg/day of highly purified fish oil capsules. After a follow-up of 4.6 years, the addition of highly purified and concentrated fish oil capsules to low-dose statin therapy resulted in a 19% reduction in the risk for major coronary events, defined as sudden cardiac death, fatal or nonfatal myocardial infarction (MI), unstable angina, or the need for revascularization.

So... why are so many people being put on statins and not also being encouraged to take a high concentrate, high purity fish oil?

References:

Effect of Different Antilipidemic Agents and Diets on Mortality - A Systematic Review - Marco Studer, MD; Matthias Briel, MD; Bernd Leimenstoll, MD; Tracy R. Glass, MSc; Heiner C. Bucher, MD, MPH Arch Intern Med. 2005;165:725-730.

Yokoyama M, Origasa H, Matsuzaki M, et al. Effects of eicosapentaenoic acid on major coronary events in hypercholesterolemic patients (JELIS): a randomised open-label, blinded endpoint analysis. Lancet 2007; 369:1090-98.