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Kapidex (dexlansoprazole) has been given the new name Dexilant — so approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration — to avoid confusion with other drugs that have similar names.

There is no problem with Kapidex itself and, other than the name switch, nothing else will be changed about the drug, the FDA said. It’s a proton pump inhibitor, used to treat heartburn and other conditions caused by excess stomach acid.

In a news release, the FDA cited pharmacy errors in dispensing Kapidex, approved in January 2009, citing confusion with the drugs Casodex and Kadian. All three drugs have widely different uses; Casodex is prescribed for prostate cancer and Kadian to treat pain.

The newly named heartburn drug will begin appearing on store shelves in late April, the FDA said. It’s manufactured by Takeda Pharmaceuticals North America.

A hand-held device that delivers a magnetic pulse to the head may offer relief for some migraine sufferers, researchers report.

The findings, which apply to migraine sufferers who experience “aura,” expand on previous research by using a device that could work at home instead of only at the doctor’s office.

It’s unclear, however, how expensive the treatment will be and how it should be administered for optimal effectiveness. And some patients didn’t seem to benefit from the treatment.

At stake are patients who suffer from migraine with aura, meaning they experience visual disruptions, tingling, numbness and weakness before a headache begins.

The device uses single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation, which is thought to prevent aura by disrupting the brain’s electrical system.

In the new study, Richard B. Lipton, of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, and colleagues randomly assigned 201 patients to take home a fake stimulation device or a real one.

Those who used the real device had less pain and recurring headaches and were less likely to need medication. Of 164 patients who treated at least one attack with the real or fake stimulation devices, 39 percent of those who used the real device reported no pain after two hours compared to 22 percent of those who used the fake device.

The researchers also report that the real stimulation device didn’t make symptoms worse or cause serious side effects.

In an accompanying commentary, Hans-Christoph Diener, of University Hospital Essen in Germany, wrote that the research suggests the technology “could be a major step forward in the treatment of migraine with aura, particularly in patients in whom presently available drug treatment is ineffective, poorly tolerated, or contraindicated.”

The study was published online in advance of print publication in the April edition of The Lancet Neurology.

SOURCE: The Lancet Neurology

Women who take diabetes drugs known as thiazolidinediones, which include Avandia and Actos, are at a greater risk of bone fractures, a new study finds.

Women who took a thiazolidinedione drug for a year were 50 percent more likely to suffer a bone fracture than patients who didn’t take the drug, the researchers found. Women older than 65 were most vulnerable, with a 70 percent higher risk.

“Older women are already at a higher risk of osteoporosis and osteoporosis-related fractures, which might explain why they appeared to be the most affected,” study senior author Dr. L. Keoki Williams, of the Center for Health Services Research at Henry Ford Hospital, said in a news release.

Thiazolidinedione drugs — which include pioglitazone (Actos) and rosiglitazone (Avandia) — help people with type 2 diabetes better control their blood sugar levels. The drugs work by lowering resistance to insulin and cutting the amount of glucose made by the liver.

But doctors have worried in recent years about reports linking the drugs to bone loss and higher risk of fractures.

The researchers studied 4,511 patients who filled at least one prescription for a thiazolidinedione between 2000 and 2007 at Henry Ford Hospital. Men were not found to be at higher risk of fracture in this study group, the study authors noted in the news release, although other recent research has suggested such a link.

The findings are published in the February issue of the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.

The drugs “may put some patients at increased risk for other health issues, and I encourage patients to talk with their physician about other suitable options,” Williams added.

People who think they’re protecting their lungs by smoking pipes or cigars instead of cigarettes are kidding themselves, a new study shows.

“Inhalation of tobacco smoke by any means is deleterious,” said Dr. R. Graham Barr, assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology at Columbia University Medical Center and lead author of a report in the Feb. 16 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine.

The cancer-causing danger of any kind of smoking has been well-publicized by the American Cancer Society and the U.S. National Cancer Institute, among others. But some smokers believe cigars or pipes can lessen respiratory danger because they think the smoke isn’t inhaled, Barr said.

To test that notion, he and his colleagues looked at the effects of cigar or pipe smoking in more than 3,500 adults ages 48 to 90 who were participants in a study of heart disease. Of these, nine of every 100 said they had smoked a pipe at some time and 11 of every 100 said they had smoked cigars.

To determine whether smoke was inhaled, the researchers measured blood levels of cotinine, a byproduct of metabolized nicotine.

Among pipe or cigar users, they found cotinine levels lower than those produced by cigarette smoking but nevertheless significant.

“For pipe smoking, it was 20 percent compared to cigarette smoking, and for cigars it was 10 percent,” Barr said. “Less, but still quite considerable.”

The effect of smoking on breathing ability was measured by spirometry, a lung function test in which people blow into a tube to determine the maximum amount of air they can move in one second.

Pipe or cigar smokers had more than twice the incidence of airway obstruction than nonsmokers, and the degree of obstruction increased with the amount of smoking, the researchers found.

The study was done because there has been a noticeable shift away from cigarettes to pipes and cigars, partly because of health warnings, partly because of heavy taxes on cigarettes, Barr said.

“There haven’t been good data in the United States from a large study showing that first, people who smoke cigars and pipes inhale the smoke and second, that on a long-term basis they have damage to their lungs,” he said.

The study results show clearly that cigar and pipe smokers are exposed to toxins and run the risk of developing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a progressive destruction of airways than can be crippling. Emphysema and chronic obstructive bronchitis are the two major forms of COPD, which is a leading cause of death among U.S. adults.

“Physicians should consider pipe and cigar smoking a risk factor for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and counsel their patients to quit,” Barr said.

“There is a public perception that this is a safer habit,” said Dr. Neil Schachter, professor of medicine and community medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City. Tobacco companies have promoted that perception, he said.

“Cigarette companies realize there is a decreasing demand for cigarettes and have tried to push tobacco products in different ways,” Schachter said. “They have been able to promote this image that smoking cigars and pipes is safer than smoking cigarettes. This article goes a long way toward showing this is not true.”

Smokers don’t often pursue medical advice about smoking, he said. “It is something patients don’t go to doctors to ask about,” Schachter said.”‘What should I smoke’? The answer is, ‘Nothing’.”

SOURCES: R. Graham Barr, M.D., Dr.P.H., Florence Irving assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology, Columbia University Medical Center, New York City; Neil Schachter, M.D., professor, medicine and community medicine, Mount Sinai Medical Center, New York City

People with high-functioning autism or Asperger’s syndrome were better able to “catch” social cues after inhaling the hormone oxytocin, new research shows.

Oxytocin,which is produced in abundance when a mother is breast-feeding her baby, is known as the “bonding” hormone.

Although there are many kinks to be worked out, experts feel the strategy holds promise to treat one of the core symptoms of autism spectrum disorder.

“When you start thinking of a hormone that can actually encourage pro-social behavior, you’re talking about potentially significant changes in quality of life,” said Clara Lajonchere, a vice president of clinical programs at the advocacy group Autism Speaks and a clinical assistant professor at the Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California.

“In the absence of intellectual deficits, the areas where they have the greatest struggle is around social communication and social connectedness,” she continued. “These people can’t interpret other people’s perceptions, they can’t read social cues, they don’t make eye contact.”

While there are drugs for the secondary symptoms of autism, such as irritability and aggression, doctors have nothing yet for the core symptoms in the areas of language, social interaction and intellectual deficits.

Prior studies have shown a strong effect of oxytocin on people with autism, as well as on people who are not on the autism disorders spectrum. One study found that autistic people seem to have a lower sensitivity to oxytocin than people without the disorder.

“There’s no doubt that oxytocin has a big effect on social interactions in anyone. It’s almost like a designer drug, a drug which has a selective effect on a behavior in the normal range,” said Keith Young, vice chairman of research in psychiatry and behavioral science at the Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine in Temple and the neuroimaging and genetics core leader at the VA Center of Excellence for Research on Returning War Veterans at the Central Texas Veterans Health Care System.

The new study, led by Angela Sirigu at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience in Lyon, France, was published in this week’s issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It involved 13 adults, most of them men, aged 17 to 39. All had high-functioning autism or Asperger’s syndrome.

Participants performed different tasks — either after inhaling oxytocin or without using the hormone.

When observed playing a virtual ball game, individuals who had inhaled oxytocin were able to interact better with their virtual partners compared to untreated participants.

Also, after inhaling oxytocin, participants showed more alertness to socially important visual cues in pictures of human faces.

There were, however, wide variations in individual responses, the team noted.

“It’s not clear whether this would be effective at all in children or in young adults who had intellectual problems,” warned Young.

The long-term effects of the hormone are also uncertain.

“I really want to encourage clinical trials in this area because of its potential significance, but we have to be very careful in terms of safety data,” Lajonchere said. “Safety data is really critical.”

Also, scientists would need to come up with a different method of delivery, Young said.

“The nasal [inhaled] drugs only work for a few minutes. Potentially it would be very difficult to be using this drug once an hour or something. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense,” he pointed out. “But it does point the way to the possibility of raising oxytocin levels with other kinds of compounds to increase oxytocin levels more generally over a longer period of time. I don’t know whether this is a realistic therapy as we have it now but, potentially, in the future it could really help these people whose primary autistic symptoms are having to do with reduction in social activity.”

SOURCES: Clara Lajonchere, Ph.D., vice president, clinical programs, Autism Speaks, and clinical assistant professor, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California; Keith Young, Ph.D., vice chairman, research in psychiatry and behavioral science, Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine, Temple, and neuroimaging and genetics core leader, VA Center of Excellence for Research on Returning War Veterans, Central Texas Veterans Health Care System

Some good news in the war on weight: Obesity in the United States may finally be stabilizing instead of increasing, two new studies show.

But the rates of obesity remain high, with about one-third of Americans still falling into that weight category. And, rates of obesity among already heavy 6- to 19-year-old boys appear to be increasing.

“Obesity still remains a significant problem that we need to deal with, but recent data suggests the increasing trend of obesity may be slowing down,” said the lead author of one of the studies, Cynthia Ogden, an epidemiologist at the National Center for Health Statistics in Hyattsville, Md.

Results of the studies were being published online Jan. 13 in advance of print publication Jan. 20 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

In an accompanying editorial, Dr. J. Michael Gaziano, from the Massachusetts Veterans Epidemiology Research and Information Center, wrote that these studies “offer a glimmer of hope that in the United States at least, the steady, decades-long increases in overweight and obesity may have slowed or perhaps reached a plateau. But even if these trends can be maintained, 68 percent of U.S. adults are overweight or obese, and almost 32 percent of school-aged children and adolescents are at or above the 85th percentile of body-mass index (BMI) for age.”

The consequences of obesity are far-reaching. Excess weight is linked to type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, cancer, joint disease, sleep apnea, asthma and other chronic conditions, Gaziano said.

After remaining relatively stable between 1960 and 1980, obesity rates steadily increased, according to government statistics gathered from 1988 to 1994 and again from 1999 to 2000.

The current studies included data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) gathered from 2007 to 2008, which were compared with statistics from 1999 through 2006. One study focused on adults, while the other looked at children from infancy through the teen years.

The adult study found the prevalence of overall obesity was 33.8 percent — 32.2 percent in men and 35.5 percent in women. The rates of obesity for women remained relatively stable during the study period. In men, however, the rates went up during the first five years and then leveled off.

“The increases in the prevalence of obesity previously observed do not appear to be continuing at the same rate over the past 10 years, particularly for women and possibly for men,” wrote the researchers.

The risk of being obese increased with age, according to the study. The biggest increases came after age 40. Blacks — both male and female — and female Mexican-Americans were significantly more likely to be obese than non-Hispanic whites.

For the study on children, the researchers sorted the data into three different cut-off points, according to Ogden — a BMI over the 85th percentile for age and gender, over the 95th percentile or the 97th. In general, over the 85th percentile is considered overweight in children, while over the 95th percentile is considered obese, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Overall, 9.5 percent of children under 2 had a BMI over the 95th percentile, and 16.9 percent of children between 2 and 19 had a BMI above the 95th percentile, according to the study.

It appears that the rate of obesity leveled off in 1999 in children and has remained steady since, with one exception. The researchers found an increase in the number of white boys between 6 and 19 years old whose BMIs were over the 97th percentile.

The researchers don’t know why the rates of obesity might be increasing in this one group, because the study wasn’t designed to find out the cause of such trends, only to spot them, Ogden said.

Anirban Basu, a health economist at the University of Chicago, said that many factors may contribute to the overall stabilization of obesity rates. “It is possible that the rise in calorie intake that we saw during the late 90s and early 2000s has flattened out,” he said. “Better awareness does play a role, given the billions of dollars spent on obesity and diabetes awareness and also diet regimens.”

“There are a lot of transitions happening at the individual level across all BMI categories. It’s important to understand those transitions and, even if overall obesity proportions have stabilized, to think about targeted intervention,” Basu added.

SOURCES: Cynthia Ogden, Ph.D., epidemiologist, National Center for Health Statistics, Hyattsville, Md.; Anirban Basu, Ph.D., health economist and assistant professor, medicine, Center for Health and the Social Sciences, University of Chicago;

Belgian transplant surgeons are reporting a medical first: They coaxed a donor trachea to grow its own network of blood vessels before transplantation by first embedding it for months in the recipient’s arm.

The innovative approach not only brought the patient a healthy, functional trachea (windpipe), but it did so without the need for taking lifelong immunosuppressive drugs, as is common with most transplant operations.

“This is very new,” said study author Dr. Pierre Delaere, a professor of otolaryngology at University Hospital Leuven. “People with airway problems can stay alive with tracheal cannula [tubing]. However, a tracheal cannula can give serious breathing and speech difficulties. This new technique may lead to improved quality of life for this group of patients.”

Delaere and his colleagues describe the new procedure in the Jan. 14 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Though many body parts, including kidneys, lungs and other organs, are relatively amenable to transplant, a complex structure like the trachea is not.

“You can’t just transplant the trachea because it doesn’t have a distinct blood vessel supplying it,” explained Dr. Megan Sykes, a transplant immunologist at Harvard Medical School and the author of an accompanying commentary. “You can’t just hook it up to the recipient’s blood vessels.”

But life for people with severely damaged trachea can be very difficult. The patient described in the study was a 55-year-old woman whose windpipe was seriously injured during an emergency tracheotomy after a car accident 25 years earlier. The woman could breathe only with the aid of implanted tracheal stents that caused her to cough continuously and left her vulnerable to a series of infections, including bronchitis and pneumonia.

The Belgian team tried an experimental form of transplant to help the woman. They first found a donor trachea from a deceased man with the same blood type, but the problem of maintaining a blood supply remained.

To get around that problem, the team opened up the woman’s lower left arm and created a kind of pocket for the 3.5-inch-long donor trachea beneath the skin. The trachea “lived” within the woman’s arm forearm for four months. During much of this time, she received standard anti-rejection drugs.

Placing the trachea within the blood- and nutrient-risk environment of the forearm “allowed a process called neovascularization to take place,” wherein the donor windpipe grew a vital network of blood vessels, Sykes explained.

But something else happened, too. The surgeons knew that once anti-rejection drugs were discontinued, the woman’s immune system would attack and destroy the soft mucosal (inner) tissue of the donor trachea. So, a month into the process they opened up the forearm and grafted a piece of soft mucosal lining from the recipient’s mouth onto the donor trachea.

Once immunosuppressive drugs were stopped, the mucosal tissue from the donor was gradually destroyed — as expected — but the transplanted mouth tissue from the patient grew to replace it. In the meantime, the hard cartilage rings of the donor trachea — which give the windpipe its structure — were not rejected, Sykes said, because cartilage is a special kind of tissue that seems to be protected from the immune system.

“So, what was left from the donor — the cartilage in the tracheal rings — is still donor-derived,” said Sykes, who is also associate director of the Transplantation Biology Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital.

After four months of being embedded in the woman’s forearm, the trachea — now made up of cells from both the recipient and donor — was carefully removed, along with its new blood vessels, and transplanted into her neck.

CT images taken after the operation “showed that the airway had been restored by the tracheal transplant,” the researchers said, and “since the removal of the airway stents, the patient has had no further episodes of bronchitis or pneumonia.”

One year later, the woman remains “satisfied with the outcome” and has no need for anti-rejection drugs, the team said.

According to Delaere, it’s tough to say just how many patients could benefit from this type of procedure in the future. However, because of its high level of safety and the lack of need for immunosuppressive therapy, “this procedure may become the standard of care,” he said.

Sykes noted that transplant specialists have toyed in the past with the notion of boosting the vasculature of transplanted tissue beforehand, “but the idea of doing that in one place [on the body] and then implanting it in another — that’s really new.”

The procedure is “a breakthrough in the context of tracheal reconstruction,” Sykes said. “It’s a way of repairing large tracheal defects that couldn’t be repaired before.”

SOURCES: Megan Sykes, M.D.,, professor, surgery and medicine, Harvard Medical School, and associate director, Transplantation Biology Research Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston; Pierre Delaere, M.D., Ph.D., professor, otolaryngology, University Hospital Leuven, Leuven, Belgium;

Daily supplements of calcium and vitamin D reduce the risk of fractures in women and men of all ages, even if they’ve suffered previous fractures, but vitamin D supplements alone don’t offer significant protection, a new study has found.

Researchers analyzed data from 68,517 people, average age 70, who took part in seven studies that looked at the effect vitamin D or vitamin D plus calcium had on reducing fractures.

The analysis revealed that vitamin D given alone in doses of 10 micrograms to 20 micrograms per day doesn’t prevent fractures. However, calcium and vitamin D given together reduce the risk of hip fractures, total fractures and possibly vertebral fractures.

The study, published online Jan. 12 in BMJ, called for additional studies of vitamin D, especially vitamin D given at higher doses without calcium.

There’s a growing consensus that a combination of calcium and vitamin D is more effective than vitamin D alone in preventing nonvertebral fractures, Opinder Sahota, of Queen’s Medical Center in Nottingham, England, wrote in an accompanying editorial.

Further research is need to determine the most effective dose, treatment duration and method of taking the calcium/vitamin D combination, Sahota said.

Is soy food helpful or harmful for women with breast cancer? Studies have yielded mixed results. A new study published today suggests that breast cancer survivors may benefit from eating moderate amounts of soy products.

In a large group of breast cancer survivors in China, researchers found that a higher intake of soy food — up to 11 grams daily — was associated with a lower risk of death or recurrence of breast cancer during follow up. (For comparison, a slice of bread generally weighs between 30 and 40 grams.)

“The key take home message from our study is that moderate amount of soy food intake is safe and may reduce risk of mortality and recurrence among women with breast cancer,” Dr. Xiao Ou Shu, of Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee noted in an email to Reuters Health.

Soy foods are rich in compounds called isoflavones — a major group of plant-derived phytoestrogens possessing both estrogen-like and anti-estrogen actions.

Eating soy has been linked to a reduced of risk of breast cancer in some studies, while other studies have suggested that soy may help breast cancer cells grow and multiply, the study team explains in Wednesday’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

To investigate further, Shu and colleagues analyzed the dietary habits of more than 5,000 women aged 20 to 75 years who were diagnosed with breast cancer between March 2002 and April 2006 and were followed up through June 2009 as part of the Shanghai Breast Cancer Survival Study.

Among 5,033 women who had surgery to remove the breast cancer, 444 women died and 534 had recurrences or breast cancer-related deaths during a median of 3.9 years.

Women who ate the most soy protein had a 29 percent lower risk of dying during the study period, and a 32 percent lower risk of having their cancer return compared to women who ate the least amount of soy protein.

At 4 years, death rates were 10.3 percent and 7.4 percent for women with the lowest and highest intakes of soy protein, and recurrence rates at 4 years were 11.2 percent and 8.0 percent, respectively.

The benefits of soy food intake on death and breast cancer recurrence peaked at 11 grams per day, the researchers note. “No additional benefits on mortality and recurrence were observed with higher intakes of soy food,” they wrote.

Eating soy was beneficial regardless of whether the women’s breast tumors were driven by estrogen (that is, estrogen-receptor positive breast cancer) or were “estrogen receptor-negative.”

The benefits of soy were also seen in both users and nonusers of tamoxifen, a drug commonly used to treat and prevent breast cancer. Prior studies have suggested that soy isoflavones may interact with tamoxifen, and both beneficial and possibly harmful interactions have been reported.

The authors of a commentary on the study caution that while it provides important information, there are several concerns, including differences in the quality, type and quantity of soy food intake between Chinese and American women.

For one thing, the average isoflavone intake in Chinese women is 47 milligrams per day compared with 1 to 6 milligrams per day for American women, Dr. Rachel Ballard-Barbash, of the National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland and Dr. Marian L. Neuhouser, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, point out.

Larger studies, they say, are needed to understand the effects of these foods among diverse subsets of women with breast cancer.

In the meantime, they add, women with breast cancer should know that “soy foods are safe to eat and that these foods may offer some protective benefit for long-term health.”

“Patients with breast cancer can be assured that enjoying a soy latte or indulging in pad thai with tofu causes no harm and, when consumed in plentiful amounts, may reduce risk of disease recurrence,” Ballard-Barbash and Neuhouser advise.

They point out, however, that any potential benefits are from soy foods. Inferences should not be made about the risks or benefits of soy-containing dietary supplements.

Certain dietary supplements appear to affect the development of colorectal cancer or its recurrence, two new studies suggest.

In one study, researchers from the U.S. National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences found that eating a diet high in omega-3 fatty acids cut the risk of developing colorectal cancer by nearly 40 percent. In the other study, from cancer researchers in Italy, consumption of a dietary supplement containing selenium was found to reduce the chances of having polyps recur by a similar amount.

Both studies were to be presented Dec. 7 in Houston at a conference on cancer prevention sponsored by the American Association for Cancer Research.

In the selenium study, 411 people, 25 to 75 years old, who’d had one or more colorectal polyps removed took either a supplement or a placebo. The supplement, described as an antioxidant compound, contained 200 micrograms of selenomethionnine (a combination of selenium and methionnine), 30 milligrams of zinc, 6,000 international units of vitamin A, 180 milligrams of vitamin C and 30 milligrams of vitamin E.

Participants had a colonoscopy one year, three years and five years after starting the regimen.

Polyps recurred in 4.2 percent of those taking the supplement, compared with 7.2 percent of the placebo group. Overall, the study found, people taking the supplement had about a 40 percent reduction in risk for a return of polyps.

The researchers estimated that, after 15 years, about 48 percent of those taking the supplement would still be free of polyps, versus about 30 percent of those not taking the supplement.

Polyps, or adenoma, are benign growths on the large bowel. Though only a small proportion progress to become cancer, about 70 to 80 percent of colorectal cancer cases begin as polyps, according to the American Association for Cancer Research. About one in four people, most older than 60, will have at least one adenoma.

Selenium is found in soil, and human consumption comes by eating plants that have absorbed the nutrient or fish or animals that have eaten plants as part of their diet. “The content of selenium in the food depends on the soil content of this trace element, and in the same country there are areas at high, adequate or low content of selenium in the soil,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Luigina Bonelli, head of the unit of secondary prevention and screening at the National Institute for Cancer Research in Genoa, Italy.

Earlier research had suggested that selenium can inhibit cell proliferation in the colon and rectum, Bonelli said.

Michele Forman, a professor of epidemiology at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, said that, though the findings are interesting, it’s impossible to tell if the benefit was attributable to the selenium or to the other vitamins and minerals included in the supplement.

“You really don’t know if it’s the selenium or some combination that reduces risk of recurrence,” Forman said.

In addition, the daily dosages of vitamins A and E taken by the participants were higher than the recommended daily allowances, Forman added. High levels of such vitamins can be detrimental, she said.

In the omega-3 study, U.S. researchers surveyed 1,509 whites and 369 blacks about their dietary habits in the past year. About half of the participants had colorectal cancer.

Among the white participants, those whose diets were in the highest fourth of omega-3 fatty acid consumption were 39 percent less likely to have colorectal cancer than those in the lowest fourth. However, for reasons the authors said they did not know, no association was noted between omega-3s and a reduction of colorectal cancer risk among black participants. The disease occurs at a higher rate among blacks than whites.

“Our finding clearly supports the evidence from previous experimental and clinical studies showing that long-chain omega-3 fatty acids inhibit tumor growth,” said the study’s lead author, Sangmi Kim, a postdoctoral fellow at the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Research Triangle Park, N.C.

Kim said the research supports boosting omega-3 intake through diet or perhaps by taking an omega-3 supplement. Omega-3 fatty acids are found in fish, especially oily fish such as salmon, mackerel, herring, anchovies, sardines and tuna. Plant-based sources include flax and flaxseed oil, Brussels sprouts, soybeans and soybean oil, canola oil, spinach, walnuts and kiwi.

Previous studies have suggested that omega-3 fatty acids act as anti-inflammatory agents and help prevent cancer. But in the new study, Forman noted, participants were asked about their diets after they had been diagnosed with colorectal cancer so it’s possible that their recollections were not fully accurate.

In addition, she said, it’s possible that the benefit was not the result of omega-3s. Those who ate more fish might have had a healthier diet overall, she said.

“Were they eating a salmon-and-broccoli diet or a hamburger-and-french-fry diet?” Forman asked. “We don’t know enough to say that it’s truly the effect of the omega-3s.”