Which Is Better: Fish Oil or a Defibrillator?

September 3, 2006

Posted by Jean Carper

You probably don’t have a defibrillator in your house, nor one inside your chest either that would shock your heart back to life if it went into irregular heartbeats and sudden cardiac arrest.

But don’t worry. That bottle of fish oil on your table is more apt to prevent sudden cardiac death, says a new study by cardiologist Thomas Kottke, at the Heart Center, Regions Hospital in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Dr. Kottke and colleagues used a computer model to show that raising body levels of omega-3 fatty acids would save 8 times more lives than having access to an external defibrillator and about twice as many lives as having a defibrillator implanted.

Remarkably, many of the lives saved in the computer-simulated community of 100,000 people, came from raising omega-3 fish oil levels in healthy people without symptoms of heart disease.Sudden cardiac arrest kills around 300,000 Americans a year, many of whom have no previous warning signs. Death is the first and last symptom.

However, a heart attack or other cardiac event can boost susceptibility to sudden cardiac death and such patients also would be saved by fish oil, the researchers concluded.

And fish oil is less expensive. The researchers figured that taking fish oil supplements to raise omega-3 levels in a population similar to that used by the computer would cost only $5.8 million a year compared with $201 million to equip every household with an automated extrernal defibrillator.

Fish oil helps stabilize the electrical activity of the heart, restoring normal hearbeats if potentially fatal arrhythmias develop. A recent Australian study in heart patients suggests that taking 850 mg of omega-3′s DHA and EPA daily for a month can cut risk of sudden cardiac death by 71%.

Bottom Line: Since a defibrillator may not be available at the last minute to save your life, taking fish oil or eating fish so you don’t need one is a far better bet for staying alive.