Fish Oil Doesn’t Lower AMD Risk

After 10 years of taking fish oil supplements, there was no big difference in the number of new AMD cases between US veterans and the control group. Photo:  NEI. Click image to enlarge. With age-related macular degeneration (AMD) a leading cause of vision loss in older adults, alternative treatments are being explored to see if they can help prevent or slow the disease, including omega-3 fatty acids found in fish oil. In a recent study presented on Sunday at ARVO 2025 in Salt Lake City, researchers investigated if taking fish oil supplements could help protect against new AMD in a population of US veterans, but they found that it does not seem to lower the risk of this condition.A retrospective cohort study using ICD coding was conducted using the US Veteran Affairs (VA) Corporate Data Warehouse, including all patients aged 55 years and older who had a baseline eye exam between 2005 and 2013 without AMD recorded at or prior to baseline and a follow-up exam 10 years later. Exclusion criteria included presence of diabetic retinopathy, retinal artery/vein occlusion, retinal surgery or pentosan polysulfate sodium use. Patients receiving fish oil from the VA pharmacy at baseline were categorized into the fish oil exposure group, which was matched to a non-exposure control group without a history of fish oil prescription based on year of baseline exam, age, sex, race, ethnicity, grouped state of residence, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, diabetes and smoking status. The primary outcome variable was AMD diagnosis at follow-up exam.Over 64,000 US veterans aged 55 and older were followed, with most patients being male (95.7%) and white (79.2%). About half took fish oil supplements (32,499 patients) and the other half (32,318) did not. Of these, 7.3% patients with fish oil exposure and 7.4% patients without fish oil exposure were diagnosed with AMD. Given this lack of a meaningfull difference in the number of new AMD cases between the two groups following 10 years of fish oil use, the authors concluded that taking fish oil supplements did not seem to lower the risk of developing AMD.“Based on these findings, we recommend that preventing AMD should focus more on lifestyle changes, such as quitting smoking, which can have a bigger impact on eye health than taking fish oil supplements,” the authors concluded. Original abstract content ©2025 Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology. Cao AA, Westanmo AD, Gravely AA, Armbrust KR. Omega-3 fatty acid supplementation and incident age-related macular degeneration in a US veteran population: findings from a retrospective cohort study. ARVO 2025 annual meeting.