Research:

How Fish Oils Reduce Inflammation

ProHealthNetwork.com, 03-14-2005

Further support for the action of omega-3 fatty acids on inflammatory conditions comes from new research on lipids in humans that are triggered by aspirin, as well as fish oil.
Omega-3 fatty acids are known to benefit patients with cardiovascular disease and arthritis, although the mechanism for these actions is not yet fully understood.

Discovery of mechanisms help support the use of nutritional ingredients for prevention of disease and could add to evidence of omega-3’s benefit to joint health.

Foods containing omega-3s are allowed to make a qualified health claim in the US for their action on heart health. A similar claim is expected in coming weeks from the UK’s voluntary health claims body. However joint health claims have less support.

Makoto Arita from the Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School and US-based colleagues have recently identified a new class of aspirin-triggered bioactive lipids in humans, called resolvins, that could partly explain fish oils�?anti-inflammatory effects on joints and blood flow.

Resolvins are made from the omega-3 fatty acids by cellular enzymes and can reduce inflammation in mice. The main bioactive component of this class of lipids, identified in mice, has been named resolvin E1. The researchers have now identified this lipid in plasma taken from volunteers given omega-3 fatty acids and aspirin.

Writing in the 7 March issue of The Journal of Experimental Medicine (vol 201, no 5, 713-722), the authors said that human resolvin E1 inhibits both the migration of inflammatory cells to sites of inflammation and the turning on of other inflammatory cells.

This study also reveals a potential pitfall of COX-2 inhibitors, drugs designed to block inflammation but recently been shown to have negative side effects on the cardiovascular system.

COX-2 is involved in making resolvin E1 and the authors suggest that inhibition of vascular COX-2 by these drugs might block the synthesis of resolvin E1, which would eliminate an important anti-inflammatory pathway.

More fish oil, fewer calories to reduce inflammation

 
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20-Apr-2006 - A low-calorie diet, rich in fish oil could reduce the markers of inflammation by as much as 90 per cent, according to the results of an animal study.

Chronic inflammation, brought about by an over-expression or lack of control of the normal protective mechanism, can lead to a range of inflammatory related disease, particularly cardiovascular disease.
The new study, published in the journal Life Sciences (Vol. 78, pp. 2523-2532), looked at the effects of fish oil and/or a calorie-restricted diet on various markers of inflammation for old and young female mice.

The diets were adopted when the mice were two months old and formulated to contain either corn oil (5 per cent) or fish oil (5 per cent containing DHA, EPA, palmitic acid), and the calorie-restriction diets (60 per cent) were fed the same levels of fish or corn oil as the controls.

At the end of the study the researchers measured various markers of inflammation, such as levels of lipid oxidation, and concentrations of reactive superoxide species, prostaglandins, and leukotriene B4, for both the young mice (four months old) and old mice (nine months old).

Mice eating the corn oil diet had superoxides levels about 18 per cent higher than corn oil fed young mice. Young mice receiving the fish oil-containing diet had superoxides levels almost 60 per cent lower. Calorie-restricted young mice had a 35 per cent level of superoxides, while young mice consuming the calorie-restricted fish oil diet had levels 90 per cent lower than the young controls.

The effect of calorie-restriction and fish oil on superoxide concentrations was also significant in the older mice. Both dietary interventions reduced levels of reactive superoxide reduced by 94 per cent.

Similar reductions were observed for both prostaglandin production levels and the age-related production of leukotriene B4.

"The major findings of our present study are that dietary fish oil and/or a 40 per cent reduced food intake, ie. calorie-restriction, effectively suppressed age-related inflammatory process," wrote the authors, led by Hae Young Chung from Pusan National University, Korea.

"One other interesting finding is that fish oil feeding seems more effective than calorie-restriction in its antioxidative and anti-inflammatory effects," they said.

The researchers also measured the expression of pro-inflammatory COX-2 and iNOS on gene expression. Both were suppressed compared to the corn oil, normal diet control mice.

The suppression of both COX-2 and iNOS reduced the expression of the pro-inflammatory prostaglandin and leukotriene, both of which are established mediators of inflammation.

The results of the study are in-line with previous research looking at either calorie-restriction or omega-3 fatty acids on markers of inflammation.

A study published recently in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (Vol. 47, Issue 2, pp. 398-402) reported that a calorie-restricted diet could slow down heart aging and prolong the lifespan of people. However, an accompanying editorial questioned whether the majority of people would be able to adopt and sustain such a strict diet.
 

From:   [http://www.nutraingredients.com/news-by-health/news.asp?id=67195&idCat=&k=fish-oil-DHA-inflammation]