• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Greenland; inuits
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.603.5794; http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/23/9/1407.full.pdf

The typical dyslipidemia associatedwith type 2 diabetes is a combinationof hypertriglyceridemia, low levels of HDL cholesterol, and abnormal LDL com-position (1). Several pharmacological approaches have been used to treat diabetic dyslipidemia (2). These include use of 3-hydroxy 3-methylglutaryl CoA (HMG-CoA) reductase inhibitors (3), fibric acid derivatives (4), and niacin (5). Standard dietary approaches focus on restriction of saturated fat and limitation of simple car-bohydrate and alcohol intake (2). During the late 1980s, several investigators reported on the use of dietary supplementation with fish oil as a means of treating diabetic dys-lipidemia (6,7). The potential role of fish oil in cardio-vascular disease risk reduction first came from observations involving Inuits in Greenland (8). Despite ingesting up to 40% of calories as fat (predominantly of marine origin), this population had a lower inci-dence of coronary heart disease than indi-viduals with similar fat intake on a more conventional diet (9). Further evaluation revealed that dietary fish oil supplementa-tion led to improvement in hypertriglyc-eridemia in nondiabetic individuals through lowering VLDL cholesterol syn-thesis (10,11). However, concern was raised in the initial nonrandomized studies in patients with type 2 diabetes that fish oil supplementation was associated with a deterioration in glycemic control (6,7). This concern continues to be mentioned in narrative reviews on the subject (12,13). The aim of the present study was to per-form a systematic review of randomized controlled trials addressing the effects of fish oil supplementation in patients with type 2 diabetes. We were specifically inter-ested in the effects of fish oil on lipid levels and glycemic control.