The Global Organization for EPA and DHA Omega-3s (GOED) recently wrote a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal in response to reporting on new omega 3 research from JAMA. The study examined the effects of fish oil supplementation containing 800 mg DHA and 100 mg EPA on incidences of postpartum depression in mothers and cognitive and language abilities in children, but was widely reported by multiple media outlets as concluding that omega 3s have no benefit in pregnancy.

While reports on the study have been carried in dozens of publications so far, GOED chose to respond to the Wall Street Journal article since it was the most widely read publication of those following the story. Most of the articles carried headlines saying there is no benefit from omega 3s, but failed to note a secondary finding showing that rates of preterm births were significantly reduced. It also found that a similarly significant increase in induced births was needed, but as some obstetricians have noted it is much easier to induce labor than to prevent premature births and the complications that follow.

According to GOED, there were several limitations to the study that prevent it from being used to make general conclusions about omega 3s in pregnancy, including:

• The treatment was administered for only 14 weeks (i.e., last trimester) of pregnancy and did not continue through episodes of postpartum depression;
• The omega 3 status and depressive state of the patients were not measured before or after the study; and
• There was a low dose of EPA administered in the treatment, and recently, GOED says, several researchers have hypothesized that this omega 3 may play a central role in depressive conditions.

GOED felt strongly that the reporting was attempting to discredit the more than 50 randomized, controlled trials that have been conducted on 21,000 pregnant mothers with fish oils alone. As such, GOED conducted an analysis of the studies published to date and found that all of the previous studies finding no benefit on postpartum depression suffered from similar limitations, and that actually all of the specific findings from this study had been previously reported. The study really served to confirm these results, rather than replace the body of evidence supporting the beneficial role of omega 3s in pregnancy, and in particular many areas not studied in the JAMA paper.