A scientist from James Cook University in Australia said the consumption of fresh fish could help to prevent asthma, a disease condition in which a person’s airways become inflamed and narrow, making it difficult to breathe.
Professor Andreas Lopata from JCU’s Australian Institute of Tropical Health and Medicine, (AITHM) disclosed this in a new research which tested 642 people who worked in a fish processing factory in South Africa.
Going by available data, the incidence of asthma has more than doubled, raising concerns on the need to find non-drug therapies that could tackle and reduce the high rate of incidence from the respiratory disease.
Lopata said: “Asthma incidence has nearly doubled in the past 30 years and about half of asthma patients do not get any benefit from the drugs available to treat it.
“So, there is a growing interest in non-drug treatment options. There is an increasing consumption of what is known as the n-6 Polyun-saturated Fatty Acid (PUFA) found in vegetable oils and a decline in consumption of n-3 PUFA, which is mainly found in marine oils and crudely, there has been a global move from fresh fish to fast food.
“Around 334 million people worldwide have asthma, and about a quarter of a million people die from it every year,” according to estimates from the World Health Organisation (WHO).
"African-Americans in the United States (US) die from asthma at a higher rate than people of other races or ethnicities. More than 11.5 million people with asthma, including nearly three million children, report having had one or more asthma episodes or attacks in 2015."
Lopata said the current theory is that the dramatic change in diet worldwide is behind the rise of the disease.
"The fishing village was chosen for the testing because it had a population with high fish consumption and low socioeconomic status, so it would be likely that marine oils from fish and other seafood would be the main source of n-3, rather than supplements."
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