Omega-3 fatty acids improvements in emotional health.

Essay by mystikalkashA+, May 2008

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In today's world, new diet trends tend to come and go with very few actually sticking around and being worthwhile, but those that do can be of great benefit to us. One such trend is the use of omega-3 fatty acids in one's diet, primarily from consuming fish. The benefits of these acids being, better digestion, increased intelligence, and now according to new research from a study discussed in a recent WebMd article omega-3 fatty acids could also possibly lead to improvements in emotional health.

The actually study was conducted in New Zealand by Crowe Francesca, Murray Skeaff, Timothy Green and Andrew Gray began with looking at the data from a previously conducted study Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities. The Atherosclerosis Risk study was a longitudinal study (1987-1998) that consisted of 15,792 men and women from the ages of 45 to 64. However, the requirements for Player's study required that the ARIC sample sized be filtered and based on their, risk of diabetes, use of medicine, and the occurrence of cardiovascular myocardial infarction, strokes, or cardiac revascularization procedures.

This left the final sample size at 2,344. After this step was completed Player et. al. looked at the lifestyles of all of the participants to see whether thinks such as smoking or amount of exercise would have an effect on their results. At this point all patients were given three standardized tests, a basic one asking them to rate their level of social support, Lubben Social Network scale used to rate social networks among elderly people, and the Spielberger Trait Anger Scale used to rate levels of anger and hostility. After all the data was collected a series of bivariate analyses were conducted to see if which factors led to the increase in hypertension. The results of the Spielberger Trait Anger were...