Fish Oil Prevention of Mental Illness

Not infrequently, some very important medical studies don’t get the attention they deserve. A long term study about fish oil prevention of mental illness, in this case psychosis, came out in August. The results of that investigation should have been shouted from the roof tops. Its time again to raise my voice. Imagine a short term treatment, lasting only 3 months, that significantly reduced the likelihood of perhaps the most severe form of mental illness and continued to do so for the next SEVEN YEARS! If you imagined a bottle of fish oil, you nailed it. The original article was published 5 years ago. Psychiatrists at a hospital in Austria gave a fish oil supplement to a group of young adults with “ultra high risk” of developing psychosis. That risk level was determined by applying criteria that are strongly linked with psychosis (on average 40% with those characteristics develop psychosis within 12 months). The subjects were given the fish oil supplement for just 3 months. After one year, only two of the forty one subjects in the fish oil group developed psychosis. In contrast, eleven of the of forty in the placebo group became psychotic. The new investigation continued to follow those individuals over seven years. There was no further fish oil supplementation or other intervention. What did they learn? Quite impressively, they found that only four of forty one in the fish oil group had developed psychosis vs sixteen of forty in the control group. The investigators found more positive impacts. For example the fish oil group had improved social functioning compared to the others. When I think about this, the “C” word cross my mind, Cure. If you do something for 3 months and stop, but you never develop the problem, in a way that means something was cured; something was fixed. That would be amazing. The evidence so far tells us that that is exactly what happened to these young people. There have been many other important discoveries about fish oil as well as some controversies and concerns. However, these results of this safe treatment are so very impassive, with such wide spread impacts, that everyone ought to know about fish oil prevention of mental...

Fish Oil Addendum

The testing results used on the fish oil lawsuit I mentioned are posted on fishoilsaety.com. Interestingly, the oils they tested are not the usual fish oils. One problematic oil was, as I anticipated, a salmon oil. Shark liver oil was a problem and several cod liver oils were also a problem. My apologies to those of you who love cod liver oil but, adding to the concerns about adverse effects from the vitamin A in cod liver oil, now we have...

Fish Oil Facts

There are some articles appearing just now about a lawsuit claiming some big chains are selling PCB contaminated fish oil. This is interesting. Years ago I strongly urged patients to make sure that any fish oil they purchased had been tested for purity. My rationale was concern over mercury, PCBs and other toxins. As we had evidence of growing mercury levels in people, particularly in San Francisco and New York City with both dioxins and PCBs were showing up in farm raised salmon, this seemed to be a likely problem. Then a couple of reliable independent labs (most notably ConsumerLabs.com in 2008) tested almost 70 different fish oils sold in stores and published the results. What did they find? They found that none of the oils, including some sold by companies accused in this current lawsuit, had detectable levels of any toxins. They did find that a few did not have as much omega-3 oils as they claimed or that the capsules fell apart too easily. There were a couple of reasons why my expectations were wrong. First, although farm-raised salmon had shown evidence of contamination, salmon was not being used for oils. Second, mercury is not very fat soluble and so is not concentrated in oil. What is up now? Is something different? Are the fish different? As salmon oil has become a popular form of fish oil maybe my old concerns are becoming reality? Are the same fish being used (typically sardines, anchovies and mackerel) but now more laden with toxins? Was there something odd about the testing, either now or then? If it has to do with the testing, it would most likely be an issue with the current batch as the prior testing was performed by two different labs not a single lab as now. We will all have to stay tuned to learn the answers. BestMichael Carlston,...