This kind of summary of various studies illustrates what is wrong with nutritional medicine in the hands of convention doctors and researchers. Our whole medical orientation is toward curing diseases, preferably with drugs. The idea of preventing disease through the use of vital nutrients, diet, exercise, and stress reduction is alien to the PharmoMedicoIndustrial Complex, and worst of all it costs a whole lot less.
All these so called nutrition studies try varying one nutrient like you would with a drug. What is need is studies using combinations of nutrients and diet that should reasonably target prevention of certain conditions. Dr. Atkins has written a number of books on this approach. Currently I am reading “Dr. Atkins’ Health Revolution: How Complementary Medicine Can Extend Your Life.” What he means by Complementary Medicine means preventive type nutriional medicine in combination with conventional medical treatment where that is warranted. Omega 3 and Omega 6 have been useful in combination with other health enhancing nutrients in successfully treating a number of conditions. Also the bottles say to take one 1 gram capsule once or twice a day. Atkins often used 8 or 9 grams a day. Comparing various studies, you no doubt have people taking different doses in different studies.
Personally, I became interested in nutritional health intervention when I was in my early 30’s. Now 40 years later I am in excellent health, look 15 or 20 years younger, never had the severe health problems that plagued my mother. They were starting, but that is when I discovered nutritional medicine. Only you can do what is really needed to maintain optimum health. The doctors are only interested when you start getting sick.
...performed a large-scale synthesis of the available randomized evidence by conducting a systematic review and meta-analysis...
What that means is that patients were randomly picked to be in one group or the other; i.e., control groups were built in. The meta-analysis part means that the researchers used some pretty heavy-duty statistics to compile and analyze the data; these statistics can find significant differences of less than a percent between different categories. (That doesn't mean the differences mean anything; just that they have been uncovered.) (The word "significant" refers to the reliability of the statistical findings, not to the subject of the research.)
My reading of this article suggests to me that the various original studies were undertaken to determine the effect of Omega-3 on triglyceride levels, not on cardiovascular disease. The assumption is that because cardiovascular disease and triglyceride levels are associated with each other, that the triglyceride levels drive cardiovascular disease progression. Such assumptions are not valid, but many physicians (who are rarely trained as researchers) who enter into research don't grasp the idea that correlation =/= causation. This meta-study actually used the data from those studies to look at cardiovascular outcomes, which is not what those studies were designed to look at (although the data was apparently recorded anyway).
I guess no one had looked at cardio outcomes before, because they had *all* made the mistaken correlation=causation assumption.
Anyway, sorry for being so long, but analysis of scientific topics can rarely be summed up in a couple of concise sentences.
About half of the 70,000 total got omega 3 supplements. One of the things I like about press releases found at ScienceDaily is that they usually link the abstract. Here's part of it:
Data Extraction Descriptive and quantitative information was extracted; absolute and relative risk (RR) estimates were synthesized under a random-effects model. Heterogeneity was assessed using the Q statistic and I2. Subgroup analyses were performed for the presence of blinding, the prevention settings, and patients with implantable cardioverter-defibrillators, and meta-regression analyses were performed for the omega-3 dose. A statistical significance threshold of .0063 was assumed after adjustment for multiple comparisons.First, it's a Meta-analysis, so caveat emptor. They picked 20 studies out of 3,635 citations . Were they cherry picked? The usual level of statistical significance is that you would expect the results to happen by chance five times or less out of one hundred. I have no idea why they went for 63 times out of 10,000.