Lack of evidence for Omega-3 fatty acid supplementation in enhancing lean mass, muscle strength, and physical function in healthy adults and clinical populations: An overview of reviews
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND & AIMS: N-3 (omega-3) polyunsaturated fatty acids (n-3-PUFA) have been hypothesized to enhance/maintain skeletal muscle mass, strength, and physical function. We conducted an overview of reviews of n-3 fatty acid monotherapy supplementation and examined whether the evidence supports the effects in healthy young and old adults and clinical populations. METHODS: In line with the PRISMA guidelines, a widely accepted framework for conducting and reporting systematic reviews, we conducted a comprehensive search for systematic reviews (OVID, Embase, Web of Science, SPORTDiscus) reporting the effect of n-3 fatty acid supplementation in our target populations. To ensure the reliability and validity of our findings, the methodological quality of the reviews was assessed using A Measurement Tool to Assess Systematic Reviews (AMSTAR) 1, a validated tool for appraising the methodological quality of systematic reviews. RESULTS: Thirty-three systematic reviews met our inclusion criteria: 19 non-oncologic, 11 oncologic, and 3 mixed. In non-oncologic populations, 4 out of 16 reviews showed some evidence that n-3-PUFA supplementation benefitted lean mass, with 3 reviews focusing on older populations. For strength, 1 out of 14 reviews found sufficient evidence in favor, while 3 others reported some evidence of n-3-PUFA ingestion. For physical function, 1 out of 15 reviews found sufficient evidence, and 3 reported some evidence favoring n-3-PUFA use. In oncologic participants, only 1 out of 13 reviews found sufficient evidence that n-3-PUFA improved lean mass. No reviews found sufficient evidence for strength or physical function improvements. CONCLUSIONS: Our analysis indicates limited evidence supporting the effectiveness of n-3-PUFA supplementation in both younger and older healthy adults, as well as clinical populations including oncologic patients, to improve or prevent loss of lean mass. Most systematic reviews concluded that n-3-PUFA supplementation did not significantly affect strength, or studies were inconclusive, and there was no consistent impact of n-3-PUFA supplementation on functional outcome measures. These findings underscore the need for further research to better understand the role of n-3-PUFA in muscle health and to guide clinical practice. Our analysis does not support n-3-PUFA monotherapy for lean mass gain/retention enhancing strength or function in healthy young and older persons, and oncologic populations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".