Omega-3 Deficiency In Psychiatric Disease, Fish Oil Opinions?

Kartoffel

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Sep 29, 2017
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Yes there is, here are some quotes from the study you'd posted:

I already pointed out why these studies by Martinez et al. are not evidence - no control group and no clear methodology. Essentially, Martinez (1998) is just a collection of confused anecdotes. Listen to this:

This child was severely retarded, hypotonic, emaciated, virtually blind, and was unresponsive to stimuli prior to DHA therapy at nine months of age. After a year of treatment, she could sit unsupported, play, and speak a few words. She then developed anorexia and, after the AA supplement was stopped, hypotonia worsened in this child. Then AA was again given and muscular tone was clearly improved in the lower limbs. Patient 2 recovered appetite after some time of AA reintroduction and started to improve again. Unfortunately, this child suddenly died of extremely acute sepsis in the course of a few hours and no other data could be obtained that might clarify the role of AA in her clinical evolution. The other four patients are still making neurological and biochemical progress with the combined DHA plus AA treatment.

He just vaguely talks about improvements without really providing any concrete data, or evidence why the improvement could be attributed to the DHA instead of beeing a normal step that would have happened during the child's development anyways. He just describes the development of six children - when something good happens, it was the DHA, and when one of them dies it's described as sudden and unfortunate because, of course, the DHA and AA would have continued to make them better...
On the other hand, the study by Paker et al. (2010) that I cited above is a controlled, double-blind, randomized trial, with a controll group and significant number of subjects. They provide clear data, and their results show that there was absolutely no benefits of DHA. In fact, they actually refer to Martinez and underline perfectly what I mean.

"In previous open studies [here they reference Martinez], it had been stated that DHA supplementation was associated with improvements in vision and growth of these children. In a similar fashion, we also noticed improvement in vision, weight, and height in both groups, but these effects were not related to DHA supplementation because they were present also in the untreated group." (Paker et al. 2010)
That's exactely what I suspect about Martinez' cases. His children probably would have seen the same improvements without the DHA, maybe one even wants to say that they saw some improvements despite the DHA. Martinez just looked at some children and attributed any improvements to DHA, without providing anything resembling scientific evidence that there is a causal relationship. When you actually do what Martinez doesn't - get a control group and use scientific standards to measure what you want to investigate - you can see that there is no difference between children that got DHA and those that don't. Paker et al. perfectly expose the completely flawed methods of Martinez.
 

Frankdee20

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Jul 13, 2017
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What do people make of the whole - Omega 3 fats comprising large percentage of the brain matter ?

I don’t **** with fish oil, gives me profoundly bad anxiety and insomnia. Too much acetylcholine increase.
 

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