Fish oil supplements may lower risk of incident, recurrent fractures

Habitual use of fish oil supplements appears to reduce the risks of incident and recurrent fractures, suggests a study. These inverse associations are more noticeable among individuals at greater genetic risk of fractures than those with a lower genetic risk.

“Epidemiologic studies have suggested an inverse association between circulating concentrations of long-chain ω-3 PUFAs and fracture risk,” the authors said.

To determine whether supplementation of long-chain ω-3 PUFA (ie, fish oil) is associated with fracture risk and whether the association is modified by genetic predisposition to fracture risk, a total of 492,713 participants from the UK Biobank who completed a questionnaire on habitual fish oil supplement use between 2006 and 2010 were enrolled in this study.

Multivariable Cox proportional hazards models were fitted to estimate hazard ratios (HRs) and 95 percent confidence intervals (CIs). In addition, a weighted fracture-genetic risk score (GRS) was derived from 14 validated single nucleotide polymorphisms.

Among participants free of fracture at baseline (n=441,756), 12,070 incident fractures occurred during a median follow-up of 8.1 years. Habitual use of fish oil supplements correlated with a lower risk of total fractures (HR, 0.93, 95 percent CI, 0.89–0.97), hip fractures (HR, 0.83, 95 percent CI, 0.75–0.92), and vertebrae fractures (HR, 0.85, 95 percent CI, 0.72–0.99) than nonuse.

The inverse association for total fractures was more pronounced among those with a higher vs lower fracture-GRS (p_interaction<0.001).

Among participants with a history of fracture at baseline (n=50,957), fish oil use resulted in a reduced risk of total recurrent fractures (HR, 0.88, 95 percent CI, 0.82–0.96) and vertebrae recurrent fractures (HR, 0.64, 95 percent CI, 0.46–0.88) but not with hip fracture recurrence.