1 Clinical Trials for Various Conditions
The purpose of this study is to see what effects the dietary supplement called Omega-3 or "Fish Oil" and it has on your colon, if any. Omega-3 (Fish Oil) is available in many forms (pills, capsules, liquid) in grocery stores, health food/vitamin stores and drug stores and from eating fish. We would like to learn if different amounts of Fish Oil specifically chosen for you individually change your colon tissue (large intestine). We hope that Fish Oil may be useful in the future as something that may help to prevent colon cancer, but we don't have any research in humans that shows that yet. We have to do this study first to see if Fish Oil effects the colon. One type of Fish Oil is has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to reduce the risk of heart disease. We are going to test a different Fish Oil supplement made by a company called Nordic Naturals. The colon lining or "mucosa" comes in contact with all the undigested things we eat or drink as it passes out to waste (stool). Animal studies suggest that fish oil may help the colon lining by reducing colon polyps and therefore colon cancer. We think this happens through chemical changes in the colon lining and also in the blood. The chemicals that we are looking at are called "fatty acids". We want to see if taking different amounts fish oil chosen for you changes these chemicals (fatty acids) in your colon or your blood. We will assign you a personal "low dose" of fish oil to take for 2 weeks, followed by a "high dose, or maximum" dose for 2 weeks. We will calculate your basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) from your height, weight, age and assess your activity factor. We have a table that then tells us your target low and high dose. Then, based on your blood samples, we figure out which target dose is the one for you that will change these chemicals (fatty acids) by about ½ (50%). We will check how well this process worked by collecting small pieces of colon tissue (biopsies) of the colon before any fish oil and after all the fish oil is consumed. We will also use blood samples to test for these fatty acids and a few others. We are going to collect diet information at several times throughout the study so we can see if the food you eat makes a difference too. We hope to learn a lot about how fatty acids are metabolized (broken down or used) in the colon directly in combination with Omega-3 supplements.