(19-03-13) Kidney disease requires magnesium

by Dr. Carolyn Dean

(NaturalNews) One of the contraindications for taking magnesium is kidney
failure. Unfortunately the public and many doctors think that means magnesium
should not be taken by anyone with any degree of kidney disease. That's just
not true and I'll explain why.

I just completed a CME (continuing medical education) course on Chronic Kidney
Disease. It's become so common that it has its own initials (CKD) and it
develops into MBD (Mineral & Bone Disorder).

Modern medicine says CKD is epidemic because of obesity, hypertension,
smoking, and lipid disorders but they admit they really don't know exactly
what's causing it. The lab findings are: elevated serum phosphorus, elevated
serum calcium, elevated PTH, and elevated FGF-23 (Fibroblast Growth Factor).
CKD develops as the kidneys slow down their filtration of urine and hold onto
calcium and phosphorous.

Even though medical texts say that calcium and magnesium compete with each
other, and an excess of one can lead to excretion of the other, there was
absolutely no mention of magnesium in this course.

What if the calcium and phosphorus elevation comes first and then causes
kidney damage? Holding onto calcium is something the body does naturally.
Whereas, magnesium is flushed out through the urine or bowels when the body is
under stress or in at times when you have saturated yourself with magnesium.
The likely reason is that early mankind lived near oceans with access to fish,
seaweeds and thus plenty of magnesium, but with few calcium sources, like dairy
and green leafy vegetables. Ocean water has three times more magnesium than
calcium and twice more magnesium than phosphorus. Therefore enhancing calcium
absorption and preventing magnesium excess were survival mechanisms that were
encoded in our wiring millennia ago. Current promotion of calcium as
supplements and fortified foods makes us a very calcified population.

Elevated calcium and phosphorous trigger an alarm in the endocrine system
which responds by trying to keep calcium and phosphate serum concentrations in
balance. However, elevated PTH (parathyroid hormone), even though it does
decrease phosphorous, also increases calcium. Vitamin D3 made in the kidney,
will decline, and that decreases calcium. So there is a great push and pull in
the midst of all these balancing mechanisms. As kidney disease progresses, the
rise in serum calcium and phosphate leads to calcification in soft tissues,
particularly in blood vessels.

If any of you know my work with magnesium, you know that too much calcium will
knock out magnesium. So, my first thought would be to treat CKD with magnesium,
which would naturally diminish calcium and phosphorus. Since magnesium is
required by about 1300 enzymes systems in the body, you can be sure it's
required by the kidneys. Magnesium also has about 4,000 receptor sites on body
proteins. However, as I mentioned above, doctors have been conditioned to avoid
magnesium in kidney disease.

I even have kidney failure as a contraindication in my Magnesium Miracle book.
However, there is a great deal of difference between kidney disease and kidney
failure. So I think doctors are avoiding it to the detriment of patients'
health. And their treatment approach is actually making magnesium deficiency
much worse.

The medical treatment of CKD is focused on attacking phosphorous. They use
calcium-based phosphate binders even while acknowledging that these drugs can
cause hypercalcemia. Some doctors want to begin using these drugs in early CKD
as a "preventive" measure. In their zeal to lower phosphorous, they allow
calcium levels to rise - and still, they pay no attention to magnesium. Their
second treatment is based on 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D, which increases calcium
absorption and decreases secretion of PTH.

Modern Medicine is also all agog about the newly-discovered hormone that
regulates phosphate. Fibroblast growth factor (FGF-23) acts on the kidney in
two ways. It causes the kidney to excrete phosphate bringing those levels down
and it regulates vitamin D3 production, which adjusts phosphate absorption.
Here again, they don't mention that vitamin D3 is also going to absorb lots
more calcium bumping out magnesium in the process.

Then my CME course took a turn toward heart-kidney syndromes and how the
heart's pumping function is altered by kidney changes. Here would be a perfect
opportunity for the doctors to tell us that the heart (specifically the left
ventricle) has the largest amount of magnesium in the whole body and when
magnesium becomes deficient with all this excess calcium, it's going to affect
the muscular action of the heart. Instead they make up some alternate-universe
story that FGF-23 and Vitamin D 3 MAY affect the heart and ponder why that
should be.

One doctor said he couldn't understand why there was such a high rate of
cardiovascular hospitalization and cardiovascular events (5-10 times the normal
population) in people with lowered kidney filtration rates but normal blood
chemistry.

IT'S BECAUSE OF LOW MAGNESIUM!@#$^#@@! Which they don't even test for. I'll
get to the lack of proper magnesium testing in a minute.

Then they wax poetic about "this wonderful piece of work showing that FGF-23
is related to left ventricular heart mass and is likely to be related to
cardiovascular events." Remember, magnesium is highest in the left ventricle.
However they complain that to treat this condition "Right now the only thing we
have available are phosphate binders."

Grrrrr. This is from top-of-the-line, overly-educated doctors that are
training other doctors and they don't seem to have a clue about magnesium and
heart disease!

Another doctor mentions that many elderly patients are in early renal failure,
and one of the standard therapies is calcium supplementation. He does express a
concern and he says "We hope the calcium is going into the bone, but of course
there is no way of knowing that it is not going into the soft tissues." I would
like to remind him that 'Hope is not a strategy!'

They end the course by saying "Our patients put their trust in us, and we need
to honor that."

OK, I'll tell you how to honor our trust...Do Your homework.

1. Use ionized magnesium testing so you know what's really going on with
magnesium levels in the body. Serum magnesium testing is highly inaccurate. It
gives everyone a false sense of security about magnesium levels. Only about 1
percent of the total body magnesium is in the serum. And since magnesium is so
crucial in preventing heart muscle spasms and arrhythmias, the body is going to
drag magnesium out of storage any time the serum magnesium levels drop.

2. Use equal amounts of magnesium and calcium in the total amount of your
diet, water and supplements. Since our standard American diet only has about
200 mg of magnesium but around 700 mg of calcium, we need to supplement
magnesium, not calcium. Even though the RDA for calcium is said to be around
1,200 magnesium. The RDA for calcium in the UK and recommended by the WHO is
500-700 mg.

3. Use magnesium in liquic, pico-ionic form to treat kidney disease. (See
Susan's case below.)

Another point of honor I'd like to mention is a suppressed study on kidney
disease. A magnesium researcher asked a colleague, who is kidney disease
specialist, to allow him to test his patients for magnesium. Ionized magnesium
and serum magnesium testing was done on 100 patients. The results were that
people with chronic kidney disease (of all varieties) have the highest levels
of serum magnesium and in the same sample, the lowest levels of ionized
magnesium. When these patients took ionized magnesium liquid their blood
ionized magnesium levels improved and they all got better. When the magnesium
researcher asked if the kidney specialist would write about these amazing
findings - he said he could not and refused to publish the study 'because
everyone knows that magnesium can't be taken in kidney disease!'

I have included the following story in my Future Health Now! Online Wellness
Program and in my Kindle and eBook, Invisible Minerals. It illustrates the
importance of absorption versus consumption. Susan is a dialysis patient. Her
kidneys have failed completely. She requires a machine to clean her blood. She
barely urinates.

Dialysis machines, however, are very poor at cleaning out excess minerals.
Dialysis patients usually go on a strict diet where they limit their intake of
potassium, sodium and phosphates to avoid build-up in their bloodstream. No
dietary restrictions, however, are given about magnesium - because there is so
little available in our diet it's difficult to overdose. Calcium is monitored
by serum blood testing but, as I mention below, this testing is often
inaccurate.

(Just to clarify: If your kidneys function properly, dietary "overdosing" on
magnesium is usually not a problem - you will simply urinate it out or it will
be eliminated by having increased bowel movements.)

Susan started taking magnesium citrate before she consulted me. She took about
700mg a day because she had classic magnesium deficiency symptoms of cramping,
insomnia and irritibility. She quickly began to feel welcome relief once she
went on the magnesium citrate. A week later, however, her condition worsened.
She started to become very weak, nauseous, sleepless and suffered horrible
headaches. She felt awful.

Her nurse ran a blood test and found that her magnesium levels were
dangerously high. (Again, if your kidneys work fine, this will not happen to
you. Magnesium is one of those minerals that will be released by your kidneys
and your bowels when there is too much.)

But Susan wasn't really taking all that much magnesium - only 700mg - less
than she probably needed. When she first consulted me, I suspected that her
body cells were not absorbing all the magnesium citrate. The rest was left
circulating in the blood stream, unable to pass through her kidneys into her
bladder. I immediately took her off the magnesium citrate. All her symptoms
went away in a few days.

We then tried low-dose, pico-ionic magnesium. This type of magnesium has been
broken down to 5 billionth of a meter in size, small enough to be immediately
absorbed through mineral ion receptors in cells. Several days later Susan felt
much better, had no more magnesium deficiency symptoms and a week later her
blood work showed that her magnesium levels were fine - no excess build-up.

In this one anecdotal case, the pico-ionic magnesium absorbed a lot better
than the magnesium citrate. The evidence is in the blood work and in how Susan
feels.

So, just like the magnesium researcher found, Susan's serum levels of
magnesium were high...but they never tested her ionized magnesium levels.
However, by taking pico-ionic magnesium, her serum magnesium levels went down
and she was getting the benefit of magnesium at the cellular level.

My final points? Take magnesium (you can see my recommendations on my website
under Resources) and lobby for ionized magnesium and calcium testing in your
local lab or hospital. The ionized magnesium and calcium electrodes are made by
Nova Biomedical. There are only 140 labs of 5,000 in the U.S. that do the
ionized magnesium test but Nova doesn't seem to want to give out the list of
these labs. Many more labs are already doing the ionized calcium test.

Source: Naturalnews

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