Omega-3 Fatty Acids for Depression: What the Data Show

Hi. I'm Dr Drew Ramsey, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, reporting for Medscape Psychiatry.

For those of us in clinical practice, omega-3 fatty acids represent the Holy Grail in psychiatry because they're natural; palatable for patients; and work in a different way from our other medications, in the sense that they're influencing membrane physiology. Omega-3 fatty acids have a tremendous amount of data, but the data are confusing. They're very heterogeneous. There are lots of positive studies, but also a number of negative studies. I wanted to talk about these data, because we've seen a number of meta-analyses come out just in the past year.

Let's start with the first: a meta-analysis that was published just a couple of weeks ago in the American Journal of Psychiatry, with Jerome Sarris as the first author.^[1] This study was a meta-analysis looking at adjunctive treatment of antidepressants using omega-3 fatty acids, and they found that there was a strong to moderate effect for omega-3 fatty acids as adjunctive treatment.

This study follows up two larger meta-analyses that looked at omega-3 fatty acids as monotherapy for the treatment for depression.^[2,3]The first meta-analysis came out in November; it was a Cochrane review looking at a total of 25 studies.