Omega-3 fatty acids from fish oil have had a lot of good press recently, with research suggesting they can help treat a number of problems from cardiovascular diseases to inflammation via depression and cognitive disfunction.
Now researchers from the US have shown that omega-3 could also help treat one of the world's most common diseases - diabetes. A paper presented at this week's Experimental Biology conference New Orleans shows that the fatty acid can help improve insulin function in overweight individuals.
Dr Yvonne Denkins from the Pennington Biomedical Research Institute at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge reported that just three months of daily supplementation with docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), one of the fatty acids found in fish oil, could significantly improve the level of insulin sensitivity in overweight patients.
This, she said, had major implications for the treatment of type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease where the body's blood sugar levels can rise to dangerous levels because of a failure to respond to insulin.
Denkins and her colleagues focused on 12 overweight men and women aged 40 to 70, none of whom had diabetes but all of whom suffered from the pre-diabetic condition known as insulin resistance. Each participant was given a daily supplement of 1.8 grams of DHA for a three month period.
Using blood tests at the beginning and end of the 12-week period, Denkins' team was able to assess the changes in insulin resistance. They discovered that 70 per cent of the participants showed an improvement after taking the DHA supplements, with 50 per cent of them showing significant improvements.
Denkins said that further studies were needed before any concrete claims could be made about the positive effects of DHA on diabetes, but that the preliminary results were encouraging.