Hi everyone,
This is my first post in this section of Longecity forums, I hope it's the right place to post this.
I suffer from a psychiatric condition which has been diagnosed as severe MDD, but manifests itself as a severe anxiety syndrome. For a long time I have been fixated on magnesium, for its apparent anxiolytic properties (through its inhibition glutamatergic transmission). For the last three months I have been supplementing with about 300 mg of elemental magnesium in the form of oral magnesium malate and about 200 mg of elemental magnesium in the form of magnesium chloride. These figures are averages. With magnesium malate, I tried to supplement every day, but would still skip some days and take up to 900 mg and very occasionally even more. With magnesium chloride, I would not use it at all on most days, very occasionally spray it on my entire body, and semi-regularly spray some on my neck, back and shoulders. During the last two months, I also took a total of about four Epsom salt baths using about 1.5 cups of the salts, each about 20 to 30 minutes of duration.
About 10 days ago, I took an Epsom salt bath and sprayed my entire body with magnesium chloride within one or two days of each other. When I was taking this last Epsom salt bath, I couldn't properly measure the amount of the salts and could have possibly poured up to twice more than the standard 1.5 cups. It was while taking this last Epsom salt bath that I felt unusual sensations, namely uncomfortable sensations in the chest around the heart and feeling cold in a hot bath.
I didn't think much of it at the time and felt nothing unusual for the next two to three days until I felt strangely weak and decided to measure my blood pressure. Prior to this my blood pressure has always been a perfect 120/80. When I measured it this time, it was 100/57. I researched the issue and found that hypotension can be caused my excessive magnesium supplementation, especially in the form of Epsom salt baths, and is cured by dropping all magnesium supplementation and increasing calcium intake. This is exactly what I have done, but the hypotension has persisted for about five days now.
This appears very strange to me. If the hypotension was indeed caused by excess magnesium from taking an Epsom salt bath and/or spraying my entire body with magnesium chloride (both of which I have done before with no ill effects whatsoever), my thinking is that it should be a very temporary thing lasting perhaps a few hours or a day at most until all the excess magnesium is washed out or absorbed into tissue. I would also have thought that if I first felt the effects of hypotension (as I think I did) while taking an Espsom salts bath, the effects would persist after that and then disappear. However what happened is that they disappeared straight after I got out of the bath and reappeared a few days later and will now not go away.
I should mention that I had my serum magnesium tested about 1.5 months ago and it was entirely normal. My RBC magnesium was tested about two weeks ago and was also squarely within the normal range.
I should also mention that this whole episode has happened about a week after I commenced a regime of Buspar + Circadin as per this study: http://www.ncbi.nlm....pubmed/22998742 and the unpleasant sensations which first made me measure my blood pressure commenced the day after I bumped up the Buspar from the initial dose of 10 mg to 20 mg. However, dropping it back to 10 mg and now to 5 mg has not done anything to resolve the hypotension problem. Of course, I could entirely drop both these meds and then I will probably know for sure whether they are the cause, but I'm reluctant to do so because it's one of the exceedingly small number of combinations that appears to actually do something for my anxiety and because neither buspirone nor melatonin are generally know to cause hypotension, while the mechanism of excessive magnesium and/or insufficient calcium causing hypotension is entirely clear.
So my question to the experts out there is: can an abnormal magnesium/calcium ratio in the blood caused by excessive magnesium supplementation cause hypotension which then persists despite discontinuation of magnesium supplementation?
