> "Deficits of Mg may result from inadequate intake, malabsorption, or renal loss"
Unless I missed it, the paper didn't consider another possible cause of magnesium deficiency: depression.
I.e., the paper seems to conflate correlation with causation (i.e., magnesium deficiency may cause depression), and doesn't consider that the causality may go in the other direction: that magnesium deficiency is a physiological manifestation of depression and other types of chronic negative emotion.
My experience with this is that I've worked for a long time to address chronic illness that has included conditions like depression, anxiety and chronic fatigue syndrome.
One of the many things I've tried has been to substantially increase magnesium intake, both via food sources and supplements.
My measured magnesium levels didn't change simply by increasing intake.
What has made a difference was directly addressing the emotional and outer-life causes of my depression/anxiety.
Even then it took a while, and the work/improvement is still ongoing, but it's very clear that my magnesium readings stayed low even when supplementing, and only started rising after a solid stretch of deep emotional healing work and significant improvements to life circumstances.
The still-nascent and controversial topic of epigenetics may be relevant here.
Did you test your magnesium level by blood tests? Less than 1% of magnesium (AFAIR) is stored in blood and its level can fluctuate a lot depending on your body state.
Correlation is not causation but what HN readers should remember is that most researchers are aware of that fact.
So yes, I'm pretty sure you've missed it among those 350 pages, especially given that results of treatment are mentioned in the abstract.
> Did you test your magnesium level by blood tests?
No, hair tests. Which I dread talking about in forums like this as it can be a red cloth to motivated skeptics/cynics (of which I used to be one until I was blessed with the opportunity to endure this experience), but the results have been consistent with my experienced-symptoms over a long period of time (10 years so far), and the correlation with my emotional work and subjective mood/life experience has been clear.
> Less than 1% of magnesium (AFAIR) is stored in blood and its level can fluctuate a lot depending on your body state
Yes, that's hair tests are used for this type of healing work.
> So yes, I'm pretty sure you've missed it among those 350 pages
I wish you would take more of a good-faith approach to the discussion and point to where this is mentioned.
I read over the abstract as thoroughly as I could for evidence that they properly considered this.
I can see mention of the observation that magnesium levels seemed to respond to antidepressants, but it still seems to assume that the cause is physiological, and that any mood-change is an effect not a cause/influence.
Nothing I can find in the abstract suggests that depression-causing-magnesium-deficiency was considered, studied and disproven, yet such possibilities are often raised in other circles, and it aligns with my own experience (and available evidence).
Please understand that people like myself and a few others on HN, who have been trying to share perspectives like these for many years, get rather tired of reflexive dismissals, despite having done vast amounts research and experimentation/data-collection.
I mean the fact that it works as a treatment. We don't have much more than doing a blind test and checking improvement to test causality. There are so many real world factors that elimination wouldn't work.
I see that you like Jung so I'm sure you're aware that there's more than neurochemistry that can influence it, but when talking about drugs, incentives seem to be aligned such that one should expect patented substances to have the most papers showing positive results vs something cheap and readily available.
Plus I thought you were only basing this N=1 on blood tests so I didn't like dismissal of paper based on that, thus the tone of my prev reply, I'm sorry about that.
Right yeah, I see those mentions of past studies, which suggest some positive results but don’t say much about long-term outcomes. (My own experience has been that in early stages of feeling impaired, supplementation of Mg and other nutrients would bring about short-term mood benefits but subside in the medium to long-term (and show no measured changes in hair tests), even with consistent ongoing supplementation, suggesting that the emotional/life issues are an overriding factor long-term.
I don't doubt that a simple dietary deficiency of Mg may be a causal factor for some, perhaps even most people. But studies like these often seem happy to report positive outcomes after finding, say, 70% short-term efficacy, but ignore the remainder, in which the causation may be very different.
> incentives seem to be aligned such that one should expect patented substances to have the most papers showing positive results vs something cheap and readily available.
Yes, which has been a source of frustration, but I understand modern economics, so I get it.
> Plus I thought you were only basing this N=1 on blood tests so I didn't like dismissal of paper based on that, thus the tone of my prev reply, I'm sorry about that.
Unless I missed it, the paper didn't consider another possible cause of magnesium deficiency: depression.
I.e., the paper seems to conflate correlation with causation (i.e., magnesium deficiency may cause depression), and doesn't consider that the causality may go in the other direction: that magnesium deficiency is a physiological manifestation of depression and other types of chronic negative emotion.
My experience with this is that I've worked for a long time to address chronic illness that has included conditions like depression, anxiety and chronic fatigue syndrome.
One of the many things I've tried has been to substantially increase magnesium intake, both via food sources and supplements.
My measured magnesium levels didn't change simply by increasing intake.
What has made a difference was directly addressing the emotional and outer-life causes of my depression/anxiety.
Even then it took a while, and the work/improvement is still ongoing, but it's very clear that my magnesium readings stayed low even when supplementing, and only started rising after a solid stretch of deep emotional healing work and significant improvements to life circumstances.
The still-nascent and controversial topic of epigenetics may be relevant here.