Omega-3s and CVD Prevention: A Promising Future?

COMMENTARY

Omega-3s and CVD Prevention: A Promising Future?

JoAnn E. Manson, MD, DrPH

Disclosures

November 06, 2019

14

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hello. I am Dr JoAnn Manson, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. I'd like to talk with you about a recent updated meta-analysis of randomized trials of omega-3 fatty acids and cardiovascular disease (CVD). I was a coauthor of this meta-analysis.

Our goals were twofold:

  1. To update a meta-analysis including the recent large-scale randomized trials of omega-3s, such as ASCEND, VITAL, and REDUCE-IT; and

  2. To do the meta-analysis with and without the inclusion of data from the REDUCE-IT trial, which was an outlier. This trial used a very high dose (4 g/day) of purified eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and found a very large magnitude of risk reduction.

We also wanted to do, for the first time, a dose-response analysis of omega-3s and CVD to see whether there was a dose-response gradient, and to, again, conduct this analysis both with and without REDUCE-IT.

We included 13 randomized trials with more than 127,000 participants in this report. Even in the analyses excluding REDUCE-IT, we saw a significant reduction in myocardial infarction and coronary heart diseasedeath, CVD death, and total CVD events, but no significant reduction in

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