Magnesium Supplementation: The Long Term

Studies show that some 48% of American’s consume less than the required amount of magnesium. Low magnesium levels have been associated with a truckload of troubling conditions, including type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome,  hypertension, atherosclerotic vascular disease, sudden cardiac death, osteoporosis, migraine headache, asthma, and colon cancer. This is something worth talking about.

During some continuing education last week, the StoneTree docs were reminded of a little something regarding magnesium supplementation: the importance of taking it long-term. Before we get to the reason why, it’s important to understand a little about magnesium testing.

How To Test Your Magnesium Levels

Testing for magnesium deficiency is not perfect.

In part, this is because of where magnesium is used in the body. Serum magnesium, the magnesium in the blood, is easy and cheap to measure, but magnesium has no value in the blood–it’s an intracellular mineral, meaning all of its usefulness is inside a cell. A test might suggest you have enough magnesium in your blood, but is there enough in your cells?

To measure the intracellular levels of magnesium, you can do an RBC magnesium level–this is the amount of magnesium inside a red blood cell. But, again, this isn’t a perfect test, because magnesium is most useful in muscle tissue, nervous tissue, and bone. You can have “enough” in your red blood cells, but still have low levels in other tissues.

Measuring magnesium in those other tissues, however, is much harder. For example, most patients wouldn’t willingly succumb to a muscle biopsy to determine their magnesium status.

What to do? The best/easiest measure can be to look for magnesium deficiency symptoms that improve when you start taking magnesium. These symptoms include:

  • Inability to sleep or insomnia
  • Irritability
  • Sensitivity to noise
  • Mental disturbances
  • Anxiety, depression or restlessness
  • Muscle soreness or spasms
  • Period cramps

Which brings us to why it’s important to take magnesium long-term.

Magnesium For Months vs. Weeks

Around 60% of your body stores of magnesium are in your bones. When someone suffers from symptoms of magnesium deficiency, like muscle cramps, their body will work to mobilize the magnesium from the bone stores to deal with the deficiency. But without enough magnesium intake, they’ll slowly but surely deplete that store.

When we treat a patient with a magnesium deficiency, they’ll notice an improvement in their symptoms, but it’s not uncommon for that improvement to plateau. That’s because the immediate cellular issue has been solved, and the body is changing gears, now trying to “refill” the supplies in the bones.

However, if those patients continue with the supplementation, they’ll notice that after 4-5 months there’s another level of improvement when the bone stores have been repleted, and the cells can take in even more for more optimal function.

The take-home message is this: If you feel better when you take magnesium, keep taking it for the long haul to feel even better!