Habitual Fish Oil Supplementation increases risk of Atrial Fibrillation

Written By : Dr.Niharika Harsha B |Medically Reviewed By : Dr. Kamal Kant Kohli Published On 2022-10-13T19:30:23+05:30 | Updated On 13 Oct 2022 7:30 PM IST

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.

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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.

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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,

fish oilatrial fibrillationcardiovascular diseasegenetic AF predispositionCVD

Source : European Journal of Preventive Cardiology

Dr.Niharika Harsha B

BDS, MDS

Dr.Niharika Harsha B (BDS,MDS) completed her BDS from Govt Dental College, Hyderabad and MDS from Dr.NTR University of health sciences(Now Kaloji Rao University). She has 4 years of private dental practice and worked for 2 years as Consultant Oral Radiologist at a Dental Imaging Centre in Hyderabad. She worked as Research Assistant and scientific writer in the development of Oral Anti cancer screening device with her seniors. She has a deep intriguing wish in writing highly engaging, captivating and informative medical content for a wider audience. She can be contacted at editorial@medicaldialogues.in.

Dr. Kamal Kant Kohli

Dr Kamal Kant Kohli-MBBS, DTCD- a chest specialist with more than 30 years of practice and a flair for writing clinical articles, Dr Kamal Kant Kohli joined Medical Dialogues as a Chief Editor of Medical News. Besides writing articles, as an editor, he proofreads and verifies all the medical content published on Medical Dialogues including those coming from journals, studies,medical conferences,guidelines etc. Email: drkohli@medicaldialogues.in. Contact no. 011-43720751