Conflicting Research on Omega-3 + Alzheimer’s: What’s the Truth?
OmegaMatters: Episode 54
Hosts: Dr. Bill Harris & Kelly Patterson
Guest: Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila
About this episode: In this episode,Dr. Bill Harris: : and Kelly Patterson talk to Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila. Dr. Sala-Vila received his PhD in biomedicine from the University of Barcelona in 2004. His research has involved the role of bioactive compounds, especially omega-3 fatty acids from cellular biology to epidemiology, with the ultimate goal of reducing the incidence of chronic disease by optimizing omega-3 status. He has received four postdoctoral fellowships and has published over 45 papers on fatty acids. The main focus of their discussion is a new paper on omega-3 and Alzheimer’s that is causing controversy because it claims omega-3s may accelerate congitive decline. For more information on OmegaMatters, visit https://omegaquant.com/omegamatters-broadcasts/.
SHOW TRANSCRIPT
Kelly Patterson: Welcome to Omega Matters, where we talk everything fatty acids. I’m Kelly Patterson, along with Dr. Bill Harris, and today, our guest is Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila. Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila received his PhD in biomedicine from the University of Barcelona in 2004. His research has involved the role of bioactive compounds, especially omega-3 fatty acids from cellular biology to epidemiology, with the ultimate goal of reducing the incidence of chronic disease by optimizing omega-3 status. He has received four postdoctoral fellowships and has published over 45 papers on fatty acids. Aleix, thank you so much for joining us today.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: Okay. Thank you. It’s my pleasure.
Dr. Bill Harris: Good to have you back, Aleix. Go ahead Kelly.
Kelly Patterson: Yeah. So today we’re going to be discussing a controversial recent paper, a research paper that’s been making some waves and has brought on a few panicked headlines in the media. This paper is on omega-3 and cognitive decline. Bill, do you want to go ahead and bring that up?
Dr. Bill Harris: Yeah. Hold on a second. I got to put it back on this format and then go back to us, and then go back to share and then go find the window, and here we go. Okay. Seeing what I’m looking at?
Kelly Patterson: Yeah.
Dr. Bill Harris: Okay. So yeah, like Kelly said, we’ve got an interesting study published just recently about omega-3 and Alzheimer’s disease, and it’s caused quite a bit of confusion, and so we thought we would try to walk through it and compare it with a previous study that addressed very similar questions and got to a very different conclusion, and Dr. Sala-Vila’s going to help us pick apart these two studies, so people can understand better why we might have had a different outcome.
So this study, it just came out 2026. It’s in the Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease, good journal. Title is the “Association between Omega-3 Supplementation and Cognitive Decline in Older Adults,” and we should point out, this is from a research study called the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, which is a … And maybe Aleix can tell us a little bit more about that cohort when we get there.
But their conclusion in the study, which is causing the concern, is that omega-3 supplementation may be associated with accelerated cognitive decline in older adults, potentially through adverse effects on cerebral synaptic function rather than classical AD proteinopathies, is just proteins in the blood that are markers of Alzheimer’s disease. So the bottom line here, the adverse effects of omega-3, accelerated cognitive decline with omega-3. Well, this is contrary to what we’ve been learning from many other studies, including this study, which was published three years ago in a very good journal, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. This study’s title is The Relationship between Omega-3 Fatty Acids with Dementia and Cognitive Decline: Evidence from Prospective Cohort Studies of Supplementation, Dietary Intake, and Blood Markers, and notice also here that it’s from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, which is exactly the same cohort that the previous study is from.
Here, their conclusion is dietary intake or long-term supplementation of omega-3 fatty acids may help reduce risk of Alzheimer’s disease or cognitive decline. Notice the word reduce. Notice the word increase, accelerate. So we have exactly opposite conclusions. Unfortunately, the adverse conclusion study, this one here, gets to see a lot more press than this one, which I don’t think got any press at all, which is unfortunate because this is a great finding that would help people.
So our task here, Aleix, is to try to pick these two apart. And I’ve put up this slide that you and I put together last week, I believe it was, and tried to compare these two studies. And so Kelly, why don’t you and Aleix walk through the comparison here?
Kelly Patterson: Yeah. Can you just start by explaining to us just a brief of what the cohort, what this study, this long ongoing, the Alzheimer’s study group is, the ADNI is?
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: Yeah, sure. So ADNI stands for Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, and it’s one of the most important research projects in the field of Alzheimer’s right now. It began over 20 years ago in the States and Canada, and it includes not only cognition but also brain imaging. So as we can see changes in the brain happening much before the onset of the clinical condition, but also biomarkers in the blood or in the CSF. So it has been really a breakthrough study to better understand the mechanisms leading towards Alzheimer’s.
Dr. Bill Harris: Hey, Aleix, excuse me, what’s CSF? What’s that mean?
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: CSF is cerebral …
Dr. Bill Harris: Cerebral spinal fluid?
Kelly Patterson: Fluid.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: Yeah, that’s it. Sorry.
Dr. Bill Harris: That’s okay.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: I’m just used to the accronym, not the whole word. Yeah.
Dr. Bill Harris: And what is cerebral spinal fluid? What is that stuff?
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: So it’s a lumbar puncture. So inside your spine and your back, it’s something that it’s invasive and it’s not a routine test, but it’s really useful because it allows the detection of amyloid and tau proteins, in a way that really helps us to predict the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. So for a long time, it has been the gold standard just to predict the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease. However, this is extremely invasive and it cannot be repeated on a regular basis.
Dr. Bill Harris: So this requires taking a needle in your back to try to get the fluid that floats around your brain.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: Yeah. So currently, there is a lot of effort to develop same biomarkers, but obviously not needing such invasive technique. So blood-based biomarkers or even neuroimaging techniques are much more preferred.
Dr. Bill Harris: Yeah.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: But this study has been really important for two reasons. Not only because it has standardized the protocols, and I think this is a core of the problem because it’s openly shared data, meaning that anyone can make a formal request to ADNI and can ask for the data. It’s for free, as long as you explain what you want the data for and you acknowledge that in the paper you are producing, you acknowledge, okay, I have been using this type of data.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: So this is good because it fosters a lot of science, and it has been, I repeat, it has been a breakthrough, this study, but it’s bad because everyone can have access to this data, and obviously there is good science and bad science.
Dr. Bill Harris: Yeah, right, which might be an example of what we have here.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: Yeah. In addition, we need to understand that it was not intended to go, “Okay, let’s get as much people as we can.” No, it doesn’t work this way. They tried to select people with normal cognition, so no clinical symptomatology, people experiencing some mild cognitive impairment, saying, okay, not having Alzheimer’s, but some signals that something is not working properly, and people with a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. And in other waves of this study, they expanded to early mild cognitive impairment and late mild cognitive impairment. This means that it’s not a general population, but it’s a selection of specific subgroups according to diagnosis, to clinical diagnosis, right?
Dr. Bill Harris: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: And all of them have been follow-up, not only in terms of clinics, but also in terms of changes in brain shape, molecules in the blood, or changes in cognition. Obviously, if you are cognitively healthy, you can go to mild cognitive impairment and then you can go to Alzheimer’s disease. If you already are Alzheimer’s disease, you cannot go to another clinical category, but it’s still useful because they have been able to track changes happening once you already have Alzheimer’s disease, right?
Dr. Bill Harris: Yeah.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: So going back to these papers, the most striking thing is, okay, totally opposite conclusions with the same cohort, and in addition, in terms of the fatty acid field, a cohort with, I would say 2,500 participants, not that much, many of them already with diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, it’s not a really big, big, big cohort. That cohort is important because it has lots of repeated testing, and it has lots of interesting data in terms of imaging, biomarkers and cognition, but in terms of-
Dr. Bill Harris: 2,500 people?
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: Yeah. It’s not that much. For instance, imagine UK Biobank, so it’s lots bigger.
Dr. Bill Harris: Yeah, yeah. So why are these two papers a different number of people, and neither one of them is 2,500?
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: Yeah. So I think that they decided to select this number based on the capacity to follow them, to track them, to get information from them. So back to the papers, we feel that a major source of controversy is the statistical approach because it’s so difficult to cope with the idea that, okay, same cohort, same exposure of interest, totally opposite results. So in this approach, I think that the statistical techniques that both papers apply have a strong influence. In the first one, Bill was talking about the whole cohort. This means that we grab all the participants without Alzheimer’s disease. This means that a lot of them are removed from this analysis, and we group them according, okay, the report or they disclose fish oil supplements or not.
Dr. Bill Harris: So which one of these studies are you talking about?
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: The first one.
Dr. Bill Harris: Oh, Liao?
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: No, the paper in-
Dr. Bill Harris: Or the earlier one, the one on the right here.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: Yeah, the other one.
Dr. Bill Harris: Wei et al. Okay. 1135 is what? That’s not 2,500, so who are these people?
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: No, because they need to remove all participants with already having Alzheimer’s disease.
Dr. Bill Harris: Okay.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: They were interested in following people until-
Dr. Bill Harris: The development-
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: … the instances of Alzheimer’s disease or end of the study.
And as you can see, a lot of people went out of this study because admin was conceived not only to include people with cognitive health, but also people with already diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. This means a lot of people need to be removed from this study. So they grouped participants in, okay, you use supplements of fish oil, you don’t use that. So they did lots of adjustments. They adjusted for age because it’s important. Age is the most important risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, but also sex because women are at higher risk. Education, if you have lower education, you are a higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease. And as you can see here in the slide, clinical diagnosis. This means obviously, if you are into a category of mild cognitive impairment, you are at higher risk of getting Alzheimer’s disease compared if you are into the cognitively healthy category. So that’s the reason, clinical diagnosis. They adjusted for APOE4, insomnia, depression, lots of vascular risk factors.
Dr. Bill Harris: So are you talking about the right-hand side, bottom box right now?
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: Yeah, that’s it.
Dr. Bill Harris: Okay. Let’s start a little bit more at the top and just walk through this a little more slowly.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: Okay.
Dr. Bill Harris: So with the 1135 in the 2023 paper, the favorable paper, is people who did not have Alzheimer’s disease already out of the 2,500 ish.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: That’s correct.
Dr. Bill Harris: Okay. And the 819 in Liao were a mixture of all kinds of mental status, from healthy to already existing with Alzheimer’s disease.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: Yeah.
Dr. Bill Harris: Okay.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: In that paper, they selected all participants reporting fish oil consumption, fish oil supplements.
Dr. Bill Harris: Okay.
Kelly Patterson: So that’s in the more recent paper where they selected …
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: Yeah.
Kelly Patterson: Okay. Okay.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: So they found 273 participants that disclosed use of fish oil, and they selected two participants for each one of them non-users.
Dr. Bill Harris: Non-users. Okay.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: And they did not use random selection. They select match for age, sex, APOE4 status and diagnosis. In other words, imagine that you are a 50-year-old man with no APOE4 carriership and cognitively healthy, and you disclose, “I’m using fish oil supplements.” Fine. This means that the researchers found two participants not reporting use of supplements, same age, same sex, same APOE4 status, and same diagnosis. This is not a case cohort. It’s a case control study, so they were extremely selective. And in that case, this means that, okay, fish oil supplement users were cognitively healthy, but also people with mild cognitive impairment and also people with Alzheimer’s disease. So all types of categories, of clinical categories were included, because this was not aimed at examining incidence of dementia. This was on the other paper, so I think that’s important.
Dr. Bill Harris: Okay. Yeah. Right.
Kelly Patterson: So in the first paper, they only looked at people who did not have Alzheimer’s. They got rid of all of those.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: That’s right.
Kelly Patterson: Okay. And in the second paper, they weren’t looking at diagnosis to start. They were only looking at fish oil use and then found controls to match those demographic characteristics in those people.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: That’s correct.
Kelly Patterson: Okay.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: That’s correct.
Kelly Patterson: Okay. So that’s a pretty big difference, right?
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: Oh, yes.
Kelly Patterson: I mean, just the total people who we’re looking at to begin with, regardless of diagnosis in the first study, they were without Alzheimer’s. In this study, they may have been across the spectrum from healthy cognition all the way to an Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Is that right?
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: Yeah, you are totally correct. So then it starts a follow-up. Once the participants have been selected, it becomes a follow-up. So in the first paper, in the right, so they were following participants, all of them were free of dementia per definition, and the diagnosis of dementia was done according to very strict criteria. That’s fine. On the other side, in the more recent paper, they used several tests to track changes in cognition, but these changes in cognition is not as unique as diagnosis of dementia, because, okay, changes in cognition is something that it’s quite big. There are lots of domains, domains that, okay, when one imagines Alzheimer, it always comes to mind memory, problems with memory, but it’s something that goes beyond memory. There are other domains. There are something which is called executive functions. Your capacity to make plans, it’s not related to memory. It’s also related to your day-to-day, how you perceive all the things, how you process all the things that you see, lots of domains, right?
Dr. Bill Harris: Yeah.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: So these different tests are used to get general assessment of cognition, and the higher number of the test, you get a bigger picture of how your cognition works. It’s not just a matter of memory. It’s something a little bit bigger. So they used in short three tests. The first one is MMSE, so you can see in the right. That’s for Mini-mental. Mini-mental is a good test, but it’s mostly a screening test. If you score not so good in the Mini-mental, that’s indicative that something is going on, but it’s mostly a screening test. It’s most cohorts, most larger studies use this data because, okay, they don’t have anything else. They don’t have anything better, which is fine, which is totally fine. But just using Mini-mental in this study with such important track on cognition, it’s okay. It’s okay. It’s just a screening test, but-
Dr. Bill Harris: So people who already have mild cognitive impairment or might already have Alzheimer’s disease, what does this test do in those people?
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: Well, they score much lower compared to healthy people.
Dr. Bill Harris: Just to begin with. Yeah.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: So then they do … Sorry, go.
Kelly Patterson: No, did they screen out … Since they started with looking at this cohort choosing fish oil users, did they screen out anybody based on or did they include any data based on when people started taking fish oil and why? Because if somebody is someone who was already diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or early cognitive decline, is it possible that they were more likely to take fish oil because their caretakers said, “We’re going to put you on this as something that can help your cognition.” Could that be a factor here?
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: Yes, it could, but as long, I understand, they were just using for fish oil users, so that’s it.
Kelly Patterson: They didn’t look at any of that other stuff. Okay.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: Obviously, they think, okay, if people with mild cognitive impairment starts to take fish oil because this person is concerned about the risks, wants to … We are going to incorporate that because we are going to select two other persons also in the same clinical category. We are going to neutralize this effect.
Dr. Bill Harris: So reverse causation is not a likely factor here?
Kelly Patterson: Not a likely factor.
Dr. Bill Harris: Because they’re controlling for that in a way?
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: I wouldn’t say so.
Dr. Bill Harris: Okay. All right.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: So in terms of the other two tests are really good tests just to track for changes in cognition, but once Alzheimer is already there. Because we keep saying, okay, we want to prevent Alzheimer’s and we keep thinking too much. Once Alzheimer is there, it’s not that important, and it’s still important. So these tests, so these ADAS, COC13 and CDRSB are mostly designed to test or to follow or to track changes in cognition at the advanced stages of the disease. It’s not so good for people with healthy cognition.
Dr. Bill Harris: Okay.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: So just to incorporate or to better capture the changes in people with healthy cognition, other kind of tests would have been better. For instance, there’s a quite important test which is called PACC, which is Preclinical Alzheimer Composite, and it includes different types of tests, and this PACC would have been a much better test because it would have been really useful to track these changes in people with normal conditions. So in short, we have one method which is in short a screening test, and two methods which are more designed to capture changes once Alzheimer’s is already there. This means that a lot of people with mild cognitive impairment, and importantly, cognitively healthy, changes in cognition were not really good captured. I would say so.
Dr. Bill Harris: Yeah.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: And finally-
Dr. Bill Harris: Yeah. What’s on the other side here in the 2023 paper from Wei, the favorable one?
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: So in the 2023 paper, there is no use of changes in cognition because the endpoint is diagnosis of dementia.
Dr. Bill Harris: Okay.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: So diagnosis of dementia is based on medical diagnostic, and these participants were not following repeated tests of cognition.
Dr. Bill Harris: Yeah. Okay.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: So the endpoint changes a little bit. And finally, and I think that that’s an important one, in the bottom, you can see covariates in the models. So in the first paper, in the 2023 paper, they adjusted-
Dr. Bill Harris: Which ones? On the right? That’s on the right.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: On the right, yeah. Wei paper, they adjusted for lots of confounders, not only age, sex, education, clinical diagnosis before, but also lots of confounders. Because they wanted to remove the influence of, for instance, cardiovascular risk. If you have a higher cardiovascular risk, you have higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease. If you already have a history of stroke for instance, your risk is much higher, or same happens with you have heart attack, you have problems with your kidneys, or for instance, if you eat not so good, okay, maybe it doesn’t matter that much if you are consuming omega-3. If you eat good, maybe this has also disease, I would say masking a little bit the effect of omega-3 supplement can have in your risk of Alzheimer’s. So it’s important to consider, to wisely choose all the factors that you want to take into account when you are doing the stats.
Dr. Bill Harris: Okay. So we can say on the right-hand side that whatever they found was independent of these other factors, it would not influence, so this canceled out any differences between groups on these factors.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: Yeah. So I think that the selection of age, sex, education, the clinical diagnosis for this particular cohort, APOE4 carriership, so these are the use of suspects. So the selection was at least to me excellent, because okay, that’s the usual suspects and plus we are going to add some other stuff. We are going to add variables related to lifestyle, but also cardiovascular risk or even diet, multivitamins as well. I think that it covered lots of aspects that helped to be sure that the association was independent of these risk factors.
And in contrast, in the most recent paper and the more recent paper that was published, they adjusted for H6, APOE4 status and diagnosis. This is fine, except for one thing. These variables were exactly the same that they used to pick the controls to match with the cases, the users of the fish oil. So at least to me, inclusion of these variables was not that necessary because all the variables were already considered, because if you select some people that needs to be same age, same sex, APOE4 status and diagnosis compared to a specific fish oil user, this means that these variables are already considered. You don’t need to add this one into the statistical methods because you already considered them when selecting the participants you want to include in your study.
On the other side, they missed important variables. They missed these baseline variables that have a huge effect. They missed any history of cardiovascular disease, stroke, coronary artery disease. They missed all variables related to lifestyle, they missed BMI, which is an important one.
Kelly Patterson: It’s huge.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: Diabetes, hypertension, and they missed plenty of dietary or thyroid related data, for instance, vitamin B12, folate, et cetera. So at least to me, the combination of these three aspects, so the selection, which I think it was not too bad, the selection, but in particular the outcome and the covariates into the models, in other words, methodological aspects I think explains the difference between one and the other paper.
Dr. Bill Harris: Wow, let me go take that off and we’ll just talk now. So how did that paper get published, this most recent one? It should go through peer review and other scientists who are supposedly experts in the field are supposed to see these problems and say, “No, you got to go back and do some additional adjustments. We’re not going to accept this paper the way it is.” But apparently, it got through the peer review cycle and ended up with a completely contrary result, and the public or even well-informed doctors can’t tell the difference, which they don’t know why there’s a difference. You got to be an expert.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: Let me add one thing I think was so uncool, that these authors didn’t even mention the other paper, so the previous one.
Dr. Bill Harris: Oh, they didn’t even cite the other paper?
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: No, it was not cited. I think that, okay, the easiest way maybe is, okay, let’s go for the journal, but I think that it’s something that we are suffering, all of us. So there are journals, and more and more and more journals. There’s a pressure to publish, and sometimes, it’s difficult to, okay, let’s stop, let’s think, and let’s go for high quality science. Obviously, someone reviewed this paper, someone accepted this paper. This means that this paper went into the regular circuit. I don’t know if this paper is going to be cited lots of times or not. I wouldn’t cite because I think that it’s not a quality paper, but I don’t know how to … Obviously not how to correct this. Maybe we are preparing a rebuttal, but I don’t know how to prevent this happening.
One thing that we should keep in mind is that, okay, in the field of Alzheimer’s, diet is not so present, so this means that this is a kind of novelty. And in addition, I must say, what they found is quite distracting, so it attracts a lot of attention. I’m not saying that the editor said, “Okay, let’s go. Let’s publish this one.” But obviously, in this journal, they are more interested in Alzheimer’s disease, they know a lot of Alzheimer’s disease. They don’t know not so much in terms of diet and this kind of stuff. So I would say that they don’t care that much about fish oil supplements. Is that good? Is that bad? Okay. So people working within the nutrition field or in the dietetics field knows a lot about the implications of these type of statements.
Dr. Bill Harris: Yeah. But the lack of understanding about fatty acid or nutrition or diet in Alzheimer’s disease does not explain the failure to control for very common confounders.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: I totally agree, but maybe they found lots of difficulties to find reviewers or to find good reviewers on that, because obviously they try to contact people, but people in the field of nutrition but also in the field of Alzheimer’s disease were not so much.
Dr. Bill Harris: Yeah. They didn’t ask you to do this.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: Maybe someone with skills in both areas would have said, “Oh no, no way. No way.” Because people in that field, all of us know about the American Journal paper that you showed, the 2023 paper, because it’s a landmark paper, so everybody in the field of Alzheimer’s and diet knows about this paper. So it was the thing that concerned me the most saying, okay, they don’t even mention that paper. It’s a landmark paper. It’s a kind of Bible for us because we keep that in mind.
Dr. Bill Harris: Yeah. And typically, in the discussion or the introduction of any paper, you would briefly review what’s already known in the field and see what you’re going to add to it.
Kelly Patterson: They gloss over it in the beginning of the paper. There’s a little mention of some other work, but it’s very glossed over.
Dr. Bill Harris: They don’t explain why their results are different.
Kelly Patterson: No.
Dr. Bill Harris: No. That’s what you should do in the discussion.
Kelly Patterson: Yeah.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: This was putting them in an awkward position, and obviously a good reviewer would have found this or would have corrected this.
Dr. Bill Harris: Yeah, but it got through peer review, so just because something’s published in a peer review journal does not make it good science.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: Yeah. Well, I think that we are affected by this kind of fake news.
Dr. Bill Harris: Oh yeah, sure. And it’s getting easier and easier to publish papers with all these journals that will publish anything for a price.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: Yeah.
Dr. Bill Harris: To be a science journalist is pretty tough these days. You got to be a pretty good scientist to be able to translate what’s good and what’s not good to the public.
Kelly Patterson: Yeah.
Dr. Bill Harris: Wow.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: Hopefully we can … I don’t know next steps. We need to discuss whether we want to try to replicate what they did, and after including all these variables into the models, if that change or not, if the associations change or not. I think it would be interesting, but we need to discuss.
Dr. Bill Harris: Something you could do.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: Yeah.
Dr. Bill Harris: Something you could do.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: Trying to do science and trying to publish good science.
Dr. Bill Harris: Yeah. I think the trouble is if we, and we could, obtain the data from ADNI, we could run the proper statistical analysis. We would probably get an opposite outcome that they found, and we would go and publish it and nobody would even notice.
Kelly Patterson: It’s not clickbait enough.
Dr. Bill Harris: Yeah, it’s not cool enough.
Kelly Patterson: It’s unfortunate. Yeah.
Dr. Bill Harris: It’s not bad news. Good news doesn’t travel very far. Bad news travels fast, and so we’re up against that, but we have to keep doing what we do, and appreciate your deep dive into this paper, Aleix, and hopefully our readers or our listeners will feel a little bit more informed about this.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: So short message is I wouldn’t be that concerned if I was consuming supplements, so I wouldn’t be that concerned, at least based on this trial. Well, it’s not the trial. On this observational study. So my take is I think that omega-3 still are helpful in keeping brain health in a good shape.
Dr. Bill Harris: Yeah. Right. Agreed.
Kelly Patterson: All right. Well, is that it for this paper? Are we ready to move on?
Dr. Bill Harris: I think we’re ready to wrap up.
Kelly Patterson: Wrap it up.
Dr. Bill Harris: Yeah. I hope this is useful for folks.
Kelly Patterson: Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Aleix, for joining us. Talk about this really interesting, intersesting in maybe not such a good way paper, and we’ll see everybody next time on Omega Matters.
Dr. Bill Harris: Thanks, Kelly. Bye-bye. Thank you, Aleix.
Kelly Patterson: Bye.
Dr. Aleix Sala-Vila: Bye.