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Taking supplements of Omega-3, the fatty acids found in fish, showed no added benefits for heart attack patients, a German study found on Monday, contradicting previous research.

“The Omega trial found no significant differences in the rates of heart attack, stroke, sudden cardiac death or death from any cause among patients assigned to guidelines-based optimal medical care alone or optimal medical care plus Omega-3 fatty acids,” the study said.

It was unveiled at the 58th conference of the American College of Cardiology which has been meeting since Saturday in Orlando, Florida.

But it goes against the findings of earlier studies which have said Omega-3 extracts can prolong the lives of heart attack patients.

The study authors said, however, that those studies had been conducted when the treatment for heart conditions was not as advanced as it is today.

“In our study, we saw no beneficial effect. In patients who are already taking optimal medical therapy, cardiac event rates become very low and Omega-3 do not further improve them,” said Jochen Senges, a professor of cardiology at the Heart Center Ludwigshafen, University of Heidelberg, Germany.

The study involved 3,827 patients from 104 German hospitals, heart centers and university hospitals.

Between three to 14 days after suffering a heart attack, patients were randomly prescribed one year’s treatment with highly purified Omega-3 fatty acids or a placebo.

“It would be incorrect to say that Omega-3 fatty acids are not effective, but we could not find any additional benefits after optimizing medical therapy,” Senges said.

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Healthy people could cut their risk of heart disease in half with a new ’super pill’ that combines low doses of aspirin and drugs that lower blood pressure and cholesterol, a study said Monday.

“We believe that the polypill probably has the potential to reduce heart disease by 60 percent and stroke by 50 percent,” lead investigator Salim Yusuf told reporters at the American College of Cardiology’s annual meeting, where the study was presented. “The thought that people might be able to take a single pill to reduce multiple cardiovascular risk factors has generated a lot of excitement. It could revolutionize heart disease prevention as we know it,” Yusuf said.

In the three-month study cardiologists compared the impact on blood pressure, cholesterol and heart rate of the combination “polypill” and the medications that make it up, taken individually or together.

The study involved 2,053 patients, recruited from heart centers around India between March 2007 and August 2008.

The polypill contains low doses of three medications against high blood pressure; simvastatin, which lowers LDL — or bad cholesterol — and aspirin, a known blood-thinner. “Before this study, there were no data about whether it was even possible to put five active ingredients into a single pill,” the study said.

“We found that it works,” the researchers said.

Participants in the study were divided into groups and given either the polypill or aspirin, the cholesterol-lowering medication, or one of the three blood pressure medications on their own; different combinations of blood pressure medications, or all three blood pressure treatments with or without aspirin.

The researchers found that blood pressure in participants in the polypill group was lowered as much as in the group taking the three blood pressure medications together, with or without aspirin.

Those blood pressure reductions “could theoretically lead to about a 24-percent risk reduction in congestive heart disease and 33 percent risk reduction in strokes in those with average blood pressure levels,” the study said.

The polypill reduced LDL cholesterol significantly more than in all other groups except the one in which simvastatin was taken alone. The simvastatin group’s LDL levels fell only slightly more than the polypill group, the study found.

Heart rates in the polypill group and the group taking one of the blood-pressure medications, atenolol, fell by seven beats a minute — significantly more than in the other study groups.

Side-effects in patients taking the polypill were the same as when taking one or two medications, the study found. The study was “a critical first step to inform the design of larger, more definitive studies, as well as further development of appropriate combinations of blood-pressure lowering drugs with statins and aspirin,” said Yusuf.

Dr Christopher Cannon, a cardiologist from Harvard University, said the polypill took the medical world a step closer to beating heart disease, a leading cause of death worldwide. Some 80 percent of heart disease cases are thought to occur in developing countries.

“The concept is simple. Several different drugs are available (generically and thus inexpensively) to treat many of the cardiac risk factors. So, combining them in one pill could reduce heart disease by 80 percent,” Cannon said in a comment piece in The Lancet, in which the results of the study were published.

“This approach has obvious appeal and vast implications for global health, because heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide,” he wrote.

Still, some said the pill was unlikely to provide panacea for all heart patients.

Dr. Robert Bonow, a former president of the American Heart Association and co-director of the Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute at Northwestern University in Chicago, told ABC News that while the pill might be better than nothing for many who would otherwise receive no care, a one-size-fits-all approach makes individualized treatment difficult.

“This is not a tailored treatment, and it’s low doses,” he told the television network.

“So maybe in people with high blood pressure, it is not enough to lower their blood pressure. Or in people with high cholesterol, it is not enough to get them to the target cholesterol levels that their physicians would like to see.”

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People who drink their tea piping hot run a higher risk of throat cancer than counterparts who prefer a cooler cuppa, according to an investigation published Friday by the British Medical Journal.

Cancer of the oesophagus is linked especially to smoking and alcohol abuse but hot beverages have also been considered a risk factor, possibly because of damage to throat tissue.

Interested in finding out more, Iranian researchers went to Golestan province, which has one of the highest rates of oesophageal cancer in the world.

Inhabitants there sip large quantities of hot black tea — typically drinking more than a litre (1.8 pints) per day per person — but also have a low incidence of tobacco and alcohol use.

A team led by Reza Malekzadeh of the Digestive Disease Research Centre at Tehran University of Medical Sciences looked at 300 people who had been diagnosed with a throat tumour and a matched group of 571 healthy people who lived in the same area.

Those who drank hot tea (between 65-69 degrees Celsius, 149-156 degrees Fahrenheit) were twice as likely to develop throat cancer compared with those who drank warm or lukewarm tea, whose temperature was 65 C (149 F) or less.

Drinking very hot tea (at least 70 C, 158 F) was associated with an eightfold increased risk compared with warm or lukewarm tea.

In an editorial, The Lancet said the study backed evidence that scorching fluids may cause damage to the throat’s epithelial lining and lead to cancer, although exactly how this happens remains unclear.

But it also said that there was no cause for panic, as most people tend to drink tea at a warm temperature. Previous studies in Britain have reported an average temperature preference of 56-60 C (133-140 F).

It recommended that tea junkies wait at least four minutes before drinking from a freshly boiled cup.

The study said there was no association between the amount of tea that was consumed and the risk of cancer.

Its scope did not include an assessment of risk for coffee and other hot beverages.

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