With magnesium supporting so many vital roles in the body, ensuring you maintain optimal magnesium levels protects health and function on countless levels. While deficiency symptoms provide clues, getting your actual magnesium levels tested via blood, cellular measurements or excretion ratios supplies objective data guiding appropriate supplementation.
Deficiency symptoms arise as a lack of magnesium allows over 500 enzyme systems and neuro-hormonal pathways to falter. Pay attention to the onset of this common phenomenon that tends to fluctuate and worsen during times of stress due to accelerated cellular turnover and excretion losses. Keeping a symptom journal helps identify patterns aligned with lifestyle factors undermining your magnesium status week to week. However, early deficiency stages may cause no overt symptoms as the body adapts by robbing circulating pools to maintain tissue concentrations.
Blood testing for magnesium levels
Serum magnesium testing from standard blood panels provides limited clinical usefulness for identifying marginal deficiency in the early stages. Blood samples mainly show remaining extracellular magnesium rather than reflecting tissue or intracellular concentrations. Levels get tightly controlled in circulation via shifts between blood, cells, and bones. So, blood results still plot “normal” even as tissue deficits grow substantial, only signaling losses once late-stage severe deficiency manifests with overt symptoms like seizures. For this reason, other analytical methods make for better diagnostic indicators of magnesium deficit.
Red blood cell magnesium testing
Measuring magnesium content inside red blood cells (RBC) offers improved insights into tissue availability since cells soak up and then harbor minerals once absorption occurs. RBC magnesium is more closely associated with pathology from deficiencies like mitral valve prolapse, migraines, insulin resistance, etc. Studies demonstrate magnesium successfully crossing the intestinal lining and then saturating into waiting for red blood cells even as serum levels show nothing amiss. This makes RBC readings better markers for moderate deficiency correlated to dysfunction that supplementation may help alleviate.
Magnesium retention or excretion testing
The next diagnostic evaluation tracks how much magnesium gets excreted through urine over 24 hours. Low retention reaching under 80% suggests poor intestinal absorption likely from chronic digestive issues. Those with higher losses often require more aggressive supplementation to replenish leaked stores. Conversely, tracing magnesium clearance after an intentional overdose also reveals the degree of deficiency. Healthy kidneys rapidly filter excess. But, magnesium starving tissues soak up bigger shares from pre-existing inadequacy leaving little for elimination. Monitoring delayed post-dose clearance determines where shortfalls exist.
Optimal magnesium levels
While labs set “normal” reference ranges covering population variance in magnesium testing, levels fluctuating near the low threshold likely contribute to suboptimal wellness. Functional medicine practitioners suggest optimum RBC magnesium concentrations measuring 6.8-7.0mg/dL with some climbing toward 8.0 mg/dL under aggressive repletion using highly absorbable forms like glycinate. If testing reveals lower results even within listed references, prioritize correcting insufficiency through dietary improvement and strategic supplementation. Let lab insights guide appropriate the top magnesium supplements levels and recheck levels after 3-6 months to confirm target thresholds indicating adequate cellular saturation. Quantifying needs through periodic testing minimizes speculation guiding more precise supplementation input customized over a lifetime.