An important mineral for the health of the central nervous system, magnesium is a crucial element in over 300 body reactions. It is a vital catalyst in helping enzymes produce energy and protein for memory neurons, and it also assists in the uptake of calcium and potassium. Magnesium helps maintain proper blood pressure levels by blocking the buildup of calcium inside the vessel walls. Studies have shown that magnesium deficiencies increase the risk of free radical damage in certain memory cells. In the Alzheimer's patient, magnesium levels are typically very low.
European studies have demonstrated that a magnesium deficiency increases the chance of death from a heart attack by 50 percent. Studies in Guam established that when aluminum levels are high, magnesium and calcium levels are low. Aluminum is found in cosmetics, laxatives, wait-loss preparations, baking powder, and some food additives, as well as in many cooking utensils.
Magnesium is present in most foods, especially dairy products, fish, meat, and seafood. Apples, avocados, bananas, blackstrap molasses, brewer's yeast, brown rice, garlic, green leafy vegetables, lemons, nuts, sesame seeds, wheat, and whole grains are other excellent sources.
Some of the positive effects of magnesium on the memory body include the following:
Take 250 to 350 mg of magnesium every day. If pregnant, your doctor may recommend that you take more. For optimum results, take magnesium glass at night, and be sure you take twice as much calcium with it. Some magnesium typeset, such as magnesium oxide and magnesium sulfate, are not recommended.
Cautionary note: Do not take magnesium after meals as is it weakens normal stomach acids. Be aware that the consumption of large quantities of fats, cod liver oil, calcium, vitamin D, and protein decrease magnesium absorption. Fat-soluble vitamins also hinder the absorption of this mineral, as do foods high in oxalic acid such as almonds, cocoa, rhubarb, and spinach.
New York - Five years ago, migraines were making Nelson Zotelo miserable.
"I am a waiter. Can you imagine, when you have a headache, how hard that is?" says Zotelo of the bad old days. "The pressure is that when you are busy you have to be always in a very good mood, feel no pain, with your head not being bothered by anything."
Seeking relief, Zotelo, 46, went to Dr. Barbara Levine, a nutritionist at Rockefeller University. She suggested he take 200 milligrams of the mineral magnesium daily.
"Just taking the magnesium, that's it," says Zotelo. "I used to have heavy pain. Now I feel very good."
So does a small cadre of top-flight scientists who, despite years of laboring in the shadow of calcium, the "sexy" mineral that builds bones, are proving the importance of magnesium with first-rate research.
"Magnesium is essential for keeping everything in the body working well -- cells, muscles, nerves, organs, bones," says Levine, who has set up the Magnesium Information Center, a national hotline.
Studies show that not having enough magnesium can promote and even bring about heart disease, stroke, diabetes, migraines and osteoporosis.
Yet few doctors talk about magnesium with patients and Americans rarely get enough, says Dr. Lawrence Resnick, an endocrinologist at Weill Cornell Medical Center.
"The average intake is 200 milligrams a day. The requirement is around 400."
Magnesium is a mineral of motion. "It activates every enzyme that produces energy, new protein, almost all the energy in every single cell in the body," says Dr. Mildred Seelig, who has studied it for decades.
Minerals work together to achieve a delicate, beneficial detente in the body. The other top guns are calcium, potassium and sodium. But magnesium is especially relevant, Resnick suggests.
More than 300 enzymes -- proteins that tell cells what to do -- need it to function. Without it, cells "can't do a lot of things automatically" -- whether it's contract the heart muscle, line a blood vessel or make bone.
Magnesium, Resnick says, is a "cell buffer" that monitors physical needs -- external heat or internal hormonal commands -- and activates the proper response.
Without enough magnesium, Resnick says, cells grow hyper: "Whatever that tissue does, it will overstimulate or underdo it."
Eventually, the cells and the body stop reacting as forcefully as they should.
Moreover, most life-threatening diseases that start in middle age are connected, Resnick says, counting off: "Getting overweight and progressively so, tending to diabetes and getting it, high blood pressure, gout and accelerated atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries, which leads to strokes and heart attacks."
Studies done in Resnick's lab show that magnesium deficiency underpins this entire constellation of ills -- what is known as Syndrome X, or insulin resistance, a term coined by Dr. Gerald Reaven.
Magnesium works "very closely" with potassium, says Dr. Michael Brodsky, a cardiac arrhythmia expert at the University of California at Irvine. Arrhythmias -- erratic heart contractions -- can kill.
"If potassium gets too low, the heart gets irritable, and if it gets too high, the heart can stop," Brodsky says. And potassium levels may depend on the magnesium, because "magnesium is driving the potassium process."
Magnesium "can treat dramatic attacks," he says. In one patient, nothing helped, not even an implanted defibrillator, which kept shutting off, or oral magnesium supplements the patient could not absorb properly.
"I told his doctor we needed to give him intravenous magnesium," Brodsky says, and they began infusing him with magnesium three and four days a week.
"His implanted defibrillator started working, and now he is down to one infusion a week."
Dr. Jerry Nadler, top endocrinologist at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and a diabetes expert, says simply of magnesium: "We believe in this."
Different studies show a link between low levels or intake of magnesium and increased risk of getting Type 2 diabetes, the form that develops over time but is increasingly striking children as young as 8 or 10.
Nadler studied Zucker (zucker means sugar in German) rats, which all develop diabetes in time. "Put the rat on a high magnesium diet before they get (diabetes), and they are highly protected," Nadler says.
In another study, he gave healthy people a liquid diet with everything except magnesium. "Within about three weeks, they were deficient, and most became insulin-resistant," an early sign of encroaching diabetes.
New research published in this week's issue of Nature (8/23/02) could help scientists to explain the role of magnesium in regulating blood pressure.
The study shows how magnesium activates microscopic ion channels in the membrane of a cell. These ion channels are important in controlling blood pressure and scientists will now be able to use this new finding in the quest to understand how magnesium helps to decrease blood pressure and also treat heart failure and stroke.
Researchers at Case Western Reserve University in the US report that calcium-activated potassium channels are important microscopic pathways in the cell membrane that relax the smooth muscle in a blood vessel. They also modify electrical impulses, which travel in nerve cells throughout the brain.
"Research of this kind may help to understand why some therapies such as magnesium supplements are important in the prevention and management of hypertension or heart failure," said Jianmin Cui, the lead researcher and assistant professor in the department of biomedical engineering at CWRU.
"Along with some other groups, we have discovered that when magnesium is applied to calcium-activated potassium channels, these channels will open. We know from literature that the opening of these channels can reduce blood pressure."
The Nature article ("Mechanism of magnesium activation of calcium activated potassium channels") was written by Jianmin Cui, the principal researcher, who was assisted by Jingyi Shi, senior researcher and other students from the department of biomedical engineering. The team is collaborating with Yanwu Yang and Jun Qin, structural biologists at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation. The research is supported by a $1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, Heart Lung and Blood Institute.
"The completion of stage one of the project is due to the combination of state-of-the-art bioelectric facilities and advanced structural biology results," Cui said. "The collaboration between the department of biomedical engineering and The Cleveland Clinic Foundation was key."
CWRU researchers used cloned ion channel DNA to express the ion channels in frog eggs. The ion channels are proteins made of various amino acids; the researchers mutated some of these amino acids and recorded functional change that resulted from the mutations.
Hypertension, Cui explained, results from the contraction of blood vessels, which causes an increase in blood pressure. "The diameter of blood vessels is controlled by smooth muscle cells around them," he said. "When magnesium reaches these potassium channels, the channels open causing blood vessels to dilate and therefore reduce hypertension."
According to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey conducted between 1988 and 1994 by The National High Blood Pressure Education Program, an estimated 42.3 million people in the US had hypertension. Doctors had told an additional 7.7 million on two or more occasions that they had hypertension, which gives a total of 50 million hypertensives.
"Our research is basic science, however, we hope that the results can help to explain why some treatments would work and provide rationale for development of new drugs for hypertension," Cui said.
STOCKHOLM - March 11, 2008 - Increased consumption of magnesium-rich foods such as whole grains may reduce male smokers' risk of cerebral infarction, which occurs when blood flow to the brain is blocked, a new Swedish study suggests.
Researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm analyzed the diets and other health/lifestyle habits and characteristics of 26,556 Finnish men, aged 50 to 69, who smoked but had never had a stroke. During an average of 13.6 years of follow-up, 2,702 of the men had cerebral infarctions, 383 had intracerebral hemorrhages (bleeding into the brain tissue), 196 had subarachnoid hemorrhages (bleeding between the brain and the tissues that cover it), and 84 had unspecified types of strokes.
After they adjusted for age and cardiovascular risk factors (such as diabetes and cholesterol levels), the researchers concluded that men who consumed the most magnesium (an average of 589 milligrams per day) had a 15 percent lower risk for cerebral infarction than those who consumed the least amount of magnesium (an average of 373 milligrams per day). The association was stronger in men younger than 60.
There was no association between magnesium consumption and risk for intracerebral or subarachnoid hemorrhage, said the researchers, who added that calcium, potassium and sodium intake weren't associated with risk for any type of stroke.
The findings were published in the March 10, 2008 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.
"An inverse association between magnesium intake and cerebral infarction is biologically plausible," the study authors wrote. Magnesium lowers blood pressure and may also affect cholesterol concentrations and the body's use of insulin to turn glucose into energy, both of which would affect the risk for cerebral infarction, but not hemorrhage.
"Whether magnesium supplementation lowers the risk of cerebral infarction needs to be assessed in large, long-term randomized trials," the study authors added.
Recent studies have suggested that changes in diet may help reduce stroke risk, according to background information in the study. High blood pressure is a risk factor for stroke, which means that dietary changes that lower blood pressure may reduce stroke risk.
