Health And Disease Role Of Magnesium And Trace Minerals

Magnesium is an essential mineral which is required for growth and survival of humans. Since magnesium is a mineral and not synthesizable it must be obtained through dietary foods and/or supplements. Magnesium in Human Health and Disease reviews the benefits of magnesium supplementation to reach recommended intakes as well as provides new research that suggests how reaching levels above the recommended intakes can promote health and treat various diseases. Magnesium deficiency can cause low serum potassium and calcium levels, retention of sodium, and low circulating levels of regulatory hormones. These changes in nutrients cause neurological and muscular symptoms such as tremor and muscle spasms. Further magnesium deficiency causes loss of appetite, nausea, vomiting, personality changes and death from heart failure. Causes of magnesium deficiency include alcohol abuse, poorly controlled diabetes, excessive or chronic vomiting and/or diarrhea. Thus the effects of inadequate and deficient intakes or levels of magnesium is critical to health and are reviewed by the expert clinicians in this book. Magnesium in Human Health and Disease provides the most current research to support the potential benefits or lack thereof for normal and high supplementation with magnesium. Animal model research and early human trials are reviewed to document other disease states such as hypertension, cholesterol level, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease that would benefit from increased magnesium.

Diet and Health examines the many complex issues concerning diet and its role in increasing or decreasing the risk of chronic disease. It proposes dietary recommendations for reducing the risk of the major diseases and causes of death today: atherosclerotic cardiovascular diseases (including heart attack and stroke), cancer, high blood pressure, obesity, osteoporosis, diabetes mellitus, liver disease, and dental caries.

Disorders of Mineral Metabolism, Volume I: Trace Minerals covers the pathophysiology of clinically relevant minerals and elements. This volume focuses on minerals whose average daily intake is under 50 mg. This text is composed of 12 chapters that tackle the clinical relevance and essentiality of various trace minerals in the human body, with particular emphasis on the disorders due to their abnormal metabolism. The trace mineral and elements considered in this volume include iron, coppers, zinc, lead, nickel, manganese, chromium, molybdenum, cadmium, aluminum, tin, lithium, and fluoride. Each chapter discusses the properties, body requirements, analysis, nutritional interactions, and toxicity of the mineral. This book will prove useful to biochemists, pathophysiologists, and workers in the medical field.

The brain is the most complex organ in our body. Indeed, it is perhaps the most complex structure we have ever encountered in nature. Both structurally and functionally, there are many peculiarities that differentiate the brain from all other organs. The brain is our connection to the world around us and by governing nervous system and higher function, any disturbance induces severe neurological and psychiatric disorders that can have a devastating effect on quality of life. Our understanding of the physiology and biochemistry of the brain has improved dramatically in the last two decades. In particular, the critical role of cations, including magnesium, has become evident, even if incompletely understood at a mechanistic level. The exact role and regulation of magnesium, in particular, remains elusive, largely because intracellular levels are so difficult to routinely quantify. Nonetheless, the importance of magnesium to normal central nervous system activity is self-evident given the complicated homeostatic mechanisms that maintain the concentration of this cation within strict limits essential for normal physiology and metabolism. There is also considerable accumulating evidence to suggest alterations to some brain functions in both normal and pathological conditions may be linked to alterations in local magnesium concentration. This book, containing chapters written by some of the foremost experts in the field of magnesium research, brings together the latest in experimental and clinical magnesium research as it relates to the central nervous system. It offers a complete and updated view of magnesiums involvement in central nervous system function and in so doing, brings together two main pillars of contemporary neuroscience research, namely providing an explanation for the molecular mechanisms involved in brain function, and emphasizing the connections between the molecular changes and behavior. It is the untiring efforts of those magnesium researchers who have dedicated their lives to unraveling the mysteries of magnesiums role in biological systems that has inspired the collation of this volume of work.

This book describes the role of trace elements in health and longevity, pursuing a biogerontological approach. It offers essential information on the impact of trace elements on molecular and physiological processes of aging, and on their impact on health in connection with aging. The major topics covered in its 11 chapters, each dedicated to a specific trace element or mineral, are: a) Role of the element in species longevity, b) Recommended intake for longevity in animal species and in the elderly, c) Deficiency and age-related disease, d) Excess/toxicity and age-related disease, and e) Interactions with drugs prescribed in the elderly. Clinical, animal and other laboratory models of interest in aging are included, which enable a more in-depth analysis to be made. The respective chapters are a mixture of overviews and more in-depth reviews in which the mechanisms of aging are described from the point of view of their specific interactions with trace elements and minerals.

Trace Elements in Human Health and Disease is a collection of papers presented at an international symposium on trace elements held in Detroit, Michigan on July 10-12, 1974. The symposium provided a forum for discussing the role of essential and toxic elements in human health and disease. These two volumes bring together a vast amount of information on trace elements zinc and copper, magnesium, selenium, fluoride, cadmium, lead, and mercury. They will be of great value to physicians, nutritionists, and toxicologists. A particularly interesting section relates to the leaching of important trace metals by excess dietary fiber in some developing countries. These books are one of the important monograph series published by the American Nutrition Foundation.