A couple of years I read about a test given to people with some sort
of medical problem.  I remember very few of the details, only that it
involves fish oil and sometimes people who don't know they are
allergic to fish oil are given this test.  They have a bad reaction to
it, on top of the problem they are already having.  I'm thinking maybe
the test had something to do with heart problems (but I'm not sure),
and the fish oil may be the base for the contrast dye.

Hello baerana-ga,

Patients who need to be given heparin to prevent blood clotting during
medical procedures, for example during dialysis or during surgery (eg
typically during a coronary bypass operation) are later treated with
protamine.  This is a protein that is isolated from fish sperm and it
is used to reverse the effects of the heparin and thus to reduce
increased bleeding after the procedure.  People who have fish allergy
are more likely to have a bad, even life-threatening, reaction to the
protamine.

A study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology
1998 December, Vol 32(part 7) pp. 1916-22 by Kimmel SE, Sekeres MA,
Berlin JA, Ellison N, DiSesa VJ, Strom BL. of the Center for Clinical
Epidemiology and Biostatistics and Department of Biostatistics and
Epidemiology, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine,
Philadelphia, under the title "Risk factors for clinically important
adverse events after protamine administration following
cardiopulmonary bypass." found that patients with fish allergy were
nearly 25 times more likely to experience a bad reaction than
non-allergic patients.

Search strategy: I started off by going into the Medline database
(http://www.nlm.nih.gov) where I searched on "fish allergy" alone,
since I did not know what else I was looking for.  Trawling through
the search results, I found the article mentioned above.

I then searched on Google for "protamine"
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=protamine to
find why protamine is used clinically, and found the following:
Generic Name, Protamine sulfate. Indications, Reversal of heparin
effect.
Control of bleeding caused by heparinization or heparin overdose. ...
www.neonatology.org/ref/meds/med90.html 

Finally, I searched on Google for the phrase "protamine obtained" and
found the following: "Protamine is an amino acid-rich substance
obtained from fish sperm (now mostly imported from Japan); it makes
insulin longlasting and is prescribed for some diabetics"
http://www.awionline.org/lab_animals/pratt/pratt-11.htm (From a paper
on the web site of the Animal Welfare Institute).  Incidentally, the
use of protamine in diabetes means that some diabetics can develop an
allergy to this substance and therefore also be at increased risk if
given protamine subsequently for other reasons.

I hope this answers your question to your satisfaction.  If not,
please request further clarification.  (BTW, I will be away until
Sunday night, UK time)

---

Clarification of Answer by tehuti-ga on 05 Jul 2002 04:41 PDT

PS, I did also try searching on fish oil allergy in Medline, but did
not find anything relevant to your query.

I did alot of searching before posting the question - I didn't find
anything, but I guess that is because I was so sure it was part of a
test, not actual treatment, but now that I read this it's ringing all
the right bells.  Thanks alot!