I'm reading another magnesium book ("Transdermal Magnesium Therapy") and in addition to pointing out that most people have a deficiency, it also points out that people have an overabundance of calcium due to various factors:
-- people consume a lot of calcium
-- some foods are fortified with it
-- some people supplement with it
-- the body holds onto calcium easily
Now then, I was reading this paper:
Neurogenic thoracic outlet syndrome: A case report and review of the literature
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2966747/
which says:
Quote:
Botox is a neurotoxin originating from Clostridium botulinum, a gram-positive anaerobic bacteria. It inhibits calcium-dependent acetylcholine release from presynaptic nerve endings at the neuromuscular endplate, ...
Injecting Botox into the scalene muscles, therefore, can relax those muscles and relieve symptoms. ...
Fourteen of the 22 patients (64%) who received Botox reported at least a 50% decrease in their symptoms ...
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Emphasis is mine. The article didn't mention or emphasize calcium in any other way and did not mention magnesium at all. But the "calcium-dependent" thing really caught my attention.
Given that botox has some effectiveness, and that it's mechanism has to do with blocking calcium-dependent acetylcholine, plus all the stuff I mentioned above, I wonder:
Should we TOSers be severely cutting our calcium intake in addition to supplementing with magnesium? Particularly those of us with obvious muscle spasms?
It's a hypothesis. I don't have the resources or right career to turn it into a study. But TOS is hard to treat and we're left looking for whatever we can find that may help.
Btw I'm not implying that "too much Ca & not enough Mg" is the cause of TOS or that correcting such an imbalance will cure it. But muscle spasms are part of the TOS picture for many of us, and I'm proposing that in those cases, it could be a contributing factor and therefore correcting it could be helpful on the road to recovery.
Thoughts?