Washington [US], January 26 (ANI): A recent study suggested that people who have a higher omega-3 index have a lower probability of dying due to COVID-19.

Researchers with the Fatty Acid Research Institute (FARI) and collaborators at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and in Orange County, CA, published the first direct evidence that higher omega-3 blood levels may reduce the risk for death from COVID-19 infection.

The report was published in the journal 'Prostaglandins, Leukotrienes and Essential Fatty Acids'.

There are several papers in the medical literature hypothesizing that omega-3 fatty acids should have beneficial effects in patients with COVID-19 infection, but up until now, there have been no published peer-reviewed studies supporting that hypothesis.

This study included a hundred patients admitted to the hospital with COVID-19 for whom admission blood samples had been stored. Clinical outcomes for these patients were obtained and blood was analyzed for the Omega-3 Index (O3I, red blood cell membrane EPA+DHA levels) at OmegaQuant Analytics (Sioux Falls, SD). Fourteen of the patients died.

A hundred patients were grouped into four quartiles according to their O3I, with 25 per cent of the patients in each quartile. There was one death in the top quartile (i.e., 1 death out of 25 patients with O3I>5.7 per cent), with 13 deaths in the remaining patients (i.e., 13 deaths out of 75 patients with O3I5.7 per cent) were 75 per cent less likely to die compared with those in the lower three quartiles (p=0.07). Stated another way, the relative risk for death was about four times higher in those with a lower O3I (

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