Habitual Fish Oil Supplementation increases risk of Atrial Fibrillation

Regular intake of fish oil was associated with an increased risk of incident atrial fibrillation irrespective of the genetic predisposition and background oily fish consumption as per a study that was published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology.  

Several large-scale randomized trials have shown conflicting results on regular consumption of fish oil and the development of Atrial fibrillation (AF). It is also uncertain if genetic AF risk, baseline cardiovascular disease (CVD) status, and background oily fish consumption would influence the outcome. Hence researchers conducted a study to find the association between Habitual fish oil supplementation and the risk of incident atrial fibrillation. 

A large prospective longitudinal cohort study was done on 4,68,665 participants without AF at baseline from the UK Biobank cohort. The relation between fish oil supplementation and the AF risk was assessed in the study cohort and several subgroups, including genetic AF predisposition, baseline CVD status, and background oily fish consumption.

Key findings:

• During a median follow-up of 11.1 years, fish oil users had a higher rate of incident AF (6.2% vs. 5.2%) compared to non-users.
• The rate of incident AF was higher in the low (3.7% vs. 3.0%), intermediate (5.8% vs. 4.8%), and high (9.8% vs. 8.1%) genetic AF risk groups, compared with non-users.
• In participants without CVD at baseline, fish oil users had a higher rate of incident AF (5.3% vs. 4.1%), which was not observed in participants with CVD at baseline (11.6% vs. 11.1%), with significant interaction.
• Background oily fish consumption did not modify the association between fish oil supplementation and the AF risk. 

This study shows that in individuals without CVD at baseline the risk of incident AF increases with regular fish oil supplementation despite the genetic AF predisposition and background oily fish consumption. 

Further reading: https://doi.org/10.1093/eurjpc/zwac192

Junguo Zhang, Anping Cai, Ge Chen, Xiaojie Wang, Miao Cai, Haitao Li, Steven E Nissen, Gregory Y H Lip, Hualiang Lin, Habitual fish oil supplementation and the risk of incident atrial fibrillation: findings from a large prospective longitudinal cohort study, European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, 2022; zwac192,