Magnesium May Cut Heart Deaths : Medicine: British researchers’ findings may represent an advance in the treatment of heart attack victims. Adding salts intravenously may reduces fatalities 2 1/2 percentage points.
Infusions of magnesium salts may significantly reduce the death rate from heart attacks, according to a study of 2,316 patients conducted by researchers at the University of Leicester in Britain.
The findings, if confirmed by other researchers, represent a potential advance in treating heart attacks.
Current treatments emphasize blood-thinning medications such as aspirin, clot-dissolving drugs such as streptokinase and medications for abnormal heart rhythms. The magnesium treatments could be used in addition to standard therapies, perhaps providing additional benefit.
“Intravenous magnesium sulfate is a simple, safe and widely applicable treatment,” the researchers conclude in an article to be published today in Lancet, a British medical journal.
The estimated benefit is “a reduction over the first four weeks of about 25 deaths per 1,000 patients treated.”
In their study, the researchers found that patients who received magnesium salt infusions had a death rate of 7.8% over the 28 days after their heart attack, compared to a death rate of 10.3% in patients who received infusions of saline solution instead.
Magnesium salts are not a routine therapy for heart attack patients. But cardiologists said that they are sometimes given to critically ill patients with dangerous heart rhythms.
I have “cautious optimism that (magnesium) may be useful” in the treatment of heart attack patients, said Dr. Gerald Pohost, director of cardiology at the University of Alabama in Birmingham.
Pohost, who is also chairman of the council of clinical cardiology of the American Heart Assn., added that although many American cardiologists had “heard about it, I am not sure a lot . . . are using it.”
Magnesium is an essential mineral for humans. It has many uses in medicine, such as preventing seizures during complicated pregnancies.
Heart attacks occur when arteries supplying blood to the heart muscle become blocked, depriving the tissue of oxygen. Although the role of magnesium in preventing such damage is not understood, a leading theory is that the mineral can protect heart tissue from injury caused by lack of blood.
Previous studies have suggested that magnesium may have a role in treating heart attacks. But those studies have been too small to be conclusive. The latest study, conducted in Leicester, 90 miles north of London, was large enough to show survival differences. Patients with suspected heart attacks treated at the Leicester Royal Infirmary received standard therapies and were randomly assigned to treatment with magnesium, given intravenously over a 24-hour period, or were given a placebo.
