Magnesium deficiency in type 2 diabetes mellitus andits effect on blood glucose control and diabetes complications

Abstract

Background. Diabetes has become more often in all over the world, magnesium is an essential element of the body and has lots of vital functions. There has been a trend to investigate magnesium’s effect on type2 diabetes pathogenesis and its complications. Still, more data is needed to reveal magnesium and T2 diabetes mellitus (DM) association, therefore we aimed to investigate how common magnesium deficiency in Turkish T2DM patients, and its effect on diabetes control and diabetes complications. Materials and methods. 296 patients with type 2 DM and 96 healthy controls aged between 18–65 years were enrolled in the study. After exclusion criteria, T2DM patients were divided into 2 groups according to magnesium deficiency, metabolic and physical properties of the groups were compared. Also, hypertension, metabolic syndrome, coronary artery disease, and microalbuminuria were also compared according to magnesium deficiency. Results. Magnesium deficiency was found 35.5% (86/242) in patients with type 2 DM, 4.1% (4/96) in the control group. Magnesium deficiency was more in female patients (64/86, 74.4%), male patients had more normal magnesium levels 89/166, 53.6%) (p<0.01). Hypomagnеsemia patients with T2 DM didn’t show difference in HbA1c (9.0±1.9% vs 8.8±1.6%, p=0.35), and fasting blood glucose levels (197.24±87.25 vs 177.85±57.22 mg/dl, p=0.14). Hypomagnеsemia patients with T2DM had significantly higher hyperlipidemia levels (48.8% (42/86) vs 41.0% (64/156), p=0.04). Metabolic syndrome (89.0% (73/82) vs 83.1% (123/148), p=0.22) and coronary artery syndrome (39.5% (34/86) vs 35.9% (56/156), p=0.85) didn’t differ between groups. Hypertension (81.4% (70/86) vs 67.9 (60/156), p=0.04) and microalbuminuria (66.7% (38/57) vs 43.7 (58/119), p=0.03) were significantly higher in the hypomagnеsemia T2DM group. Conclusions. Magnesium deficiency is not rare in T2DM, however, this deficiency didn’t impact blood glucose control at a significant level in current study, on the other hand, hypertension, microalbuminuria, and hyperlipidemia components of diabetes have been shown to increase with magnesium deficiency.