Exploratory Analysis of Associations Between Whole Blood Mitochondrial Gene Expression and Cancer-Related Fatigue Among Breast Cancer Survivors.
Amber S Kleckner, Ian R Kleckner, Eva Culakova and 11 others
PMID 35416182WHAT IT FOUND
Fish oil, soybean oil, or both did not differ in breast cancer survivors' cancer-related fatigue.
Fatigue improved over six weeks in all groups; lower baseline mitochondrial gene expression was linked to greater improvement, an exploratory finding.
Key findings
01FACIT-F fatigue subscale scores improved from 26.0 to 32.5 points, an average gain of 6.5 points, but the effect of the supplementation regimen (fish oil, soybean oil, or both) did not reach statistical significance.
02Mitochondrial gene expression decreased over the intervention, and there was no effect of fish oil, soybean oil, or both.
03Lower baseline mitochondrial gene expression was associated with greater fatigue improvement (β = -0.66 ± 0.38, p = 0.084), and explained 4.7% of variance in change in fatigue.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
This is an exploratory secondary analysis based on existing data, and no power calculation was performed. The p≤0.10 threshold was treated as meaningful only to inform future research, so the baseline gene-expression finding is hypothesis-generating. Only 68 of 70 participants had evaluable RNA-Seq and fatigue data. The fatigue improvement cannot be attributed to fish oil, soybean oil, or both, because the supplement group effect was not significant. RNA-Seq normalized to total RNA, so changes in mitochondrial transcripts could reflect cell type shifts, mitochondrial copy number, gene-specific expression, or free-floating mitochondrial RNA. The study used peripheral blood and could not capture more discrete temporal relationships or tissue-specific mitochondrial function.
Declared interests
Authors report no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that fish oil, soybean oil, or both reduce cancer-related fatigue. The three supplement regimens did not differ, and the mitochondrial gene-expression association was exploratory with p = 0.084, not established as a clinical predictor.