Abstract
Yang and colleagues report that 4 to 5 weeks of feeding a fish oil-supplemented diet to rats resulted in a modest cardioprotective effect against ischemia reperfusion injury when studied in an isolated cell-free and plasma-free perfusion setup (Langendorff preparation). The fish oil diet was 12% by weight fish oil and contained 40% n-3 fatty acid, 19% eicosapentanoic acid (EPA), and 13% docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). Fish oil-fed rats exhibited improved force of cardiac contraction and less increase in coronary artery perfusion pressure compared with rats fed ordinary rodent food. Fish oil-fed rats had significantly increased myocardial tissue contents of EPA and docosapentanoic acid relative to controls. The authors concluded that the fish oil protective effects seemed to occur by a prostaglandin-mediated pathway, because the administration of Indocin (indomethacin sodium, Merck & Co, West Point, PA) completely prevented the cardioprotective effects.
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