Routes to a healthy heart:
OMACOR®: how it can help you after your heart attack
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Nine simple ways to reduce your risk of another heart attack: |
OMACOR® is a pharmaceutical preparation of highly purified and concentrated omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs). A 1 g dose of OMACOR® contains 840 mg of the omega-3 PUFAs docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA). Preparation of OMACOR® involves a meticulous four-stage purification process that eliminates a range of impurities such as heavy metal residues and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and minimizes the content of saturated fats.
OMACOR®, administered at a dose of 1 g/day, has been approved as an adjuvant therapy for prevention of further heart attacks in patients who have already survived at least one heart attack. 'Adjuvant therapy' means that OMACOR® should be used in addition to other drugs indicated for reducing the risk of a repeat heart attack and in conjunction with a healthy, heart-friendly diet that includes plenty of fruit, fish and fibre.
This approved use of OMACOR® to help reduce the risk of heart attack is based on the results of GISSI-Prevenzione, a large multicentre clinical trial conducted in more than 11,000 patients who had all suffered a heart attack within the previous 3 months. These patients received whatever drugs their doctors thought appropriate to reduce their risk of another heart attack. These drugs included aspirin, beta-blockers, other drugs to lower blood pressure, and cholesterol-lowering drugs. In addition, however, doctors treated about half these patients with OMACOR® 1 g per day for an average of 3.5 years. The other patients received either a vitamin supplement or no additional treatment.
In the study, patients who took OMACOR® were one-third less likely to have died from a heart attack than patients who had not taken OMACOR®. Scientists consider this to be an important benefit of OMACOR® and a valuable improvement in the prognosis of patients who survive a first heart attack.
The illustration below depicts the treatment benefit of OMACOR® for patients who have had a heart attack. The upper part of this diagram shows the number of patients (per 100 treated) who died of a heart attack during 3.5 years of observation despite being treated with what their doctors considered to be the most appropriate combination of preventive drugs, such as aspirin, drugs to lower blood pressure and drugs to lower cholesterol. The lower part of the diagram shows the equivalent data for patients who received OMACOR® in addition to the other drugs.
OMACOR® is simple to use: you need to take a single 1 g capsule every day. It is tasteless and odourless and has few side effects. In the GISSI-Prevenzione study the reported side effects were nausea and general disturbance of the digestive tract, which affected fewer than 5% of patients.
It is highly likely that you will use OMACOR® in combination with several other drugs. So it's good news that OMACOR® has not been shown to interact with most of these drugs. So far the only drug interaction reported with OMACOR® occurs with warfarin: OMACOR® makes warfarin act more powerfully and this can have the result of making people more prone to bleeding. Mostly this happens when OMACOR® is used at high dose (4 g/day) to treat hypertriglyceridaemia (a condition in which the levels of a certain type of fat in the blood is increased). For heart attack patients the daily dose of OMACOR® is much lower, so the risk of any problem with warfarin is smaller. However, if you are taking warfarin your doctor will want to monitor you closely during the early weeks of using OMACOR® so that your dose of warfarin can be reduced if necessary.
