Hey, all Eric Christensen here from the Real Life Pharmacology podcast. Thanks all for listening today.

I'm going to cover magnesium pharmacology. Magnesium is definitely one of those supplements I see used in practice quite a bit.

A lot of times patients don't know why they're taking it. Maybe they got a recommendation from a friend or relatives saying they should be on magnesium.

I would say overall, the majority of patients don't need extra magnesium if they're eating a normal, you know, standard kind of routine diet. But, you know,

it definitely depends upon the situation and the circumstance there. So with that said, it is a

supplement. You'll see patients do this on their own, you know, at low doses, over-the-counter doses,

usually it's probably not gonna cause too much trouble,

but there are some certain situations that I'll kind of talk about.

But magnesium serves a ton of purposes within the body,

you know, from the immune system to muscular skeletal system, cardiac functions there as well.

Magnesium is everywhere, certainly. And the situation that I probably see the most in real

practice is low magnesium levels.

And with low magnesium levels, if we've got a very severe type situation, we may have to replace with IV magnesium.

So the issue with really low magnesium that can come up is potential cardiac EKDG changes,

if severe enough, tersadts to points, things of that nature.

So can be very, very serious, but pretty uncommon in an otherwise healthy patient that way.

So one kind of characteristic that I've seen, low magnesium occur in patients,

patients who have trouble with alcoholism, they can definitely have a lower magnesium.

There are a few drugs as well, which I'll kind of talk about drug interactions

and impacting magnesium levels towards the end here. But again, really low magnesium,

the big risk is changes in that cardiac function. That's the big, big risk. Now, there can be

milder symptoms to low magnesium

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