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Omega 3 acids could protect from blindness
Updated: 06-25-2007
New York, June 25 (IANS) Increasing the dietary intake of Omega 3 fatty acids, found in certain kinds of fish, nuts and vegetable oils, may protect one from blindness, suggests a study conducted on mice.
Scientists in Boston found that they have a protective effect against blindness resulting from abnormal blood vessel growth in the eye, according to the study published in the online journal Nature Medicine.
Human clinical trials will soon begin at a children's hospital in Boston to test the effects of Omega 3 supplementation in premature babies who are at risk for vision loss, the researchers were quoted as saying by science portal EurekAlert.
Omega 3 fatty acids are already known to be beneficial for heart and brain functions. Short-term studies have indicated that taking dietary supplements of Omega 3 could also lower blood pressure in people with hypertension.
Abnormal vessel growth is the cause of retinopathy - an eye disease that leads to the eventual loss of vision. It begins with a loss of blood vessels in the retina, which becomes oxygen starved, sends out alarm signals and spurs new vessel growth. But the new vessels grow abnormally and are malformed, leaky and over-abundant.
The abnormal vessels finally pull the retina away from its supporting layer, and this retinal detachment ultimately causes blindness.
The researchers, led by Lois Smith and Kip Connor of Children's Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical School, and John Paul SanGiovanni of the National Eye Institute (NEI) studied retinopathy in mice, feeding them a diet rich in Omega-3 fatty acids.
Mice on the Omega 3 diet had less initial vessel loss in the retina than those fed with Omega 6 fatty acids. The area with vessel loss was 40-50 percent smaller.
'Our studies suggest that after initial loss, vessels re-grew quickly and efficiently in the Omega 3-fed mice,' Connor said.
'This increased the oxygen supply to retinal tissue, resulting in a dampening of the inflammatory 'alarm' signals that lead to pathologic vessel growth.'
First, again, since most readers of this forum are not Doctors, some information on the Journal Nature (another highly respected and credible reviewed Journal) from Answers.com for my fellow laymen and women:
Nature Medicine
Nature Medicine (Nat Med; ISSN 1078-8956) is an academic journal publishing research articles, reviews, news and commentaries in the biomedical area, including both basic research and early-phase clinical research. Topics covered include cancer, cardiovascular disease, gene therapy, immunology, vaccines and neuroscience. The journal seeks to publish research papers that 'demonstrate novel insight into disease processes, with direct evidence of the physiological relevance of the results.'[1]
Founded in 1995, Nature Medicine is published by the Nature Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan Publishers Ltd, and is one of the rapidly expanding stable of Nature journals. Like other Nature journals, there is no external Editorial Board, with editorial decisions being made by an in-house team, although peer review by external expert referees forms a part of the review process.
Nature Medicine is published monthly. Articles are archived online in text and PDF formats. Material over 6 months old is freely accessible.
Its 2005 impact factor was 28.878, making it the highest cited research journal in preclinical medicine. It also is among the highest impact of primary (non-review) scientific journals. By comparison, the impact factors of general science journals Science and Nature for the same period were 30.927 and 29.273, respectively.
Here is the study abstract:
Nature Medicine
Published online: 24 June 2007 | doi:10.1038/nm1591
Increased dietary intake of -3-polyunsaturated fatty acids reduces pathological retinal angiogenesis
Kip M Connor1,9, John Paul SanGiovanni2,9, Chatarina Lofqvist1,3, Christopher M Aderman1, Jing Chen1, Akiko Higuchi1, Song Hong4, Elke A Pravda1, Sharon Majchrzak5, Deborah Carper6, Ann Hellstrom7, Jing X Kang8, Emily Y Chew2, Norman Salem, Jr5, Charles N Serhan4 & Lois E H Smith1
Many sight-threatening diseases have two critical phases, vessel loss followed by hypoxia-driven destructive neovascularization. These diseases include retinopathy of prematurity and diabetic retinopathy, leading causes of blindness in childhood and middle age affecting over 4 million people in the United States. We studied the influence of -3- and -6-polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) on vascular loss, vascular regrowth after injury, and hypoxia-induced pathological neovascularization in a mouse model of oxygen-induced retinopathy1. We show that increasing -3-PUFA tissue levels by dietary or genetic means decreased the avascular area of the retina by increasing vessel regrowth after injury, thereby reducing the hypoxic stimulus for neovascularization. The bioactive -3-PUFA-derived mediators neuroprotectinD1, resolvinD1 and resolvinE1 also potently protected against neovascularization. The protective effect of -3-PUFAs and their bioactive metabolites was mediated, in part, through suppression of tumor necrosis factor-. This inflammatory cytokine was found in a subset of microglia that was closely associated with retinal vessels. These findings indicate that increasing the sources of -3-PUFA or their bioactive products reduces pathological angiogenesis. Western diets are often deficient in -3-PUFA, and premature infants lack the important transfer from the mother to the infant of -3-PUFA that normally occurs in the third trimester of pregnancy2. Supplementing -3-PUFA intake may be of benefit in preventing retinopathy.
1. Department of Ophthalmology, Harvard Medical School, Children's Hospital Boston, 300 Longwood Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA.
2. Division of Epidemiology and Clinical Research, National Eye Institute, 10 Center Drive, Bethesda, Maryland 20892, USA.
3. Department of Pediatrics, Sahlgrenska Academy, Göteborg University, Göteborg, Sweden.
4. Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative, and Pain Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Center for Experimental Therapeutics and Reperfusion Injury, Brigham and Women's Hospital, 75 Francis Street, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA.
5. Laboratory of Membrane Biochemistry and Biophysics, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, 12420 Parklawn Drive, Rockville, Maryland 20892, USA.
6. Office of the Director, National Eye Institute, 31 Center Drive, Bethesda, Maryland 20892, USA.
7. Dept of Clinical Neurosciences, Sahlgrenska Academy, Göteborg University, Göteborg, Sweden.
8. Department of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, 55 Fruit Street, Boston, MA 02114, USA.
9. These authors contributed equally to this work.
Take care.
