Magnesium Glycinate Chelate Caps by Designs For Health (DFH) 

Most gentle form of magnesium on the stomach.
Magnesium Glycinate is the best-absorbed form of magnesium, thus taking lower doses results of this form is superior than taking higher doses in other forms. Most importantly, taking magnesium glycinate does not cause gastro-intestinal distress or loose stools as with other forms of magnesium can. This chelated magnesium is supplied by Albion Advanced Nutrition, the best mineral chelators in the industry.

Studies show that most Americans are largely magnesium deficient due to foods being grown in magnesium depleted soils. This critical mineral is excellent for those with muscle cramps, those under stress (which quickly depletes magnesium), as well as diabetics. Other benefits of magnesium include heart protection, aids detoxification and PMS, promotes bone health, prevents cardiac arrhythmias, and relaxation. Magnesium glycinate offers superior absorption and allows for optimal dosing without bowel discomfort. This is the form of magnesium least likely to loosen bowels.

Conditions that Benefit from Magnesium:

• Autism/ADD/ADHD
• Arrhythmias
• Asthma
• Anxiety
• Bone health
• Chronic fatigue
• Diabetes
• Fibromyalgia
• Heart attacks/ Heart disease
• High blood pressure
• Headaches
• Hyperactivity
• Kidney stones
• Mental health
• Muscle building
• Muscle cramps
• PMS
• Stroke
• Weak immune function

Read Customer questions and answers about Other Health Concerns in our FAQ.

Are there any nutrients that help magnesium work more effectively?
Vitamin B-6 should always be used in combination with magnesium therapy for treatment of Autism and ADD/ADHD. For heart health, synergistic nutrients include carnitine, CoQ10, B-complex, and Omega 3s. For bone health, magnesium should be coupled with Calcium in a 1:1 ratio.

Autism
Studies have shown that the average magnesium levels in autistic children are below average. Evidence suggests that autistic children may improve when given large doses of magnesium along with vitamin B6. [2]

Cardiovascular Disease
When magnesium is supplemented regularly, irregular heart rhythms become more stable, high blood pressure improves, the body keeps a better balance of potassium and other important cardiovascular minerals, the heart pumps a larger volume of blood with no extra demand for oxygen, constricted blood vessels relax, allowing blood to flow more freely, and HDL cholesterol rises and LDL cholesterol falls. [5]

Acute Heart Attacks
Magnesium, when given intravenously, can stabilize or destabilize the heart. [1]

Blood Sugar Disorders
Poor sugar control raises the risk of a magnesium deficiency, which in turn further impairs sugar metabolism. How well the body metabolizes sugar is tightly linked to magnesium, making the mineral essential to anyone with diabetes or insulin resistance. [3]

High Blood Pressure
A person with high blood pressure typically has a lower level of magnesium compared with somebody who has a healthier blood pressure reading. Some hypertension patients reduce or eliminate their need for diuretics and other blood pressure medications by supplementing magnesium and other vitamins and minerals. [4]

Fibromyalgia
For anyone who copes with muscle or joint pains of this rheumatic ailment, magnesium is a valuable part of an effective treatment. [1]

Asthma
By diminishing wheezing and encouraging bronchial muscles to relax, magnesium reinforces better breathing for bronchitis, emphysema, and other chronic lung disorders. [1]

Osteoporosis
For preventing and perhaps reversing osteoporosis, magnesium might be more important than calcium. It balances the body’s calcium supply and keeps it from being depleted. [1]

Hyperactivity
Autism Research Review International. 1998 V. 12 No. 2, p.4

For several decades, researchers have been reporting that magnesium supplementation, generally in conjunction with vitamin B6, can reduce the behavior problems of autistic children. A new study indicates that magnesium can also reduce hyperactivity in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Polish researchers Barbara Starobrat-Hermelin and Tadeusz Kozielec recently discovered that hyperactive children were more likely to suffer from magnesium deficiency than other children. This led the researchers to investigate the effects of magnesium supplementation on hyperactivity in children with ADHD and recognized magnesium deficiency.

The researchers studied 75 magnesium deficient hyperactive children between the ages of 7 and 12. Fifty of the patients received magnesium supplements (3 mg/lb./day) for six months, while a control group of 25 children did not receive the supplements. (A number of children in both groups were also taking neuroleptic medications.)

The researchers report, "In all scales assessing hyperactivity after magnesium treatment, those examined obtained statistically better results in comparison with [their] state before therapy." In contrast, they note, the control subjects' behaviors worsened over the six-month study period. "The results of our work," Starobmt-Hermelin and Kozielec say, "indicate a need for magnesium supplementation in children with ADHD."[18]

Hyperactivity References:

• The Effects Of Magnesium Physiological Supplementation on Hyperactivity in Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Positive Response to Magnesium Oral Loading Test," Barbara Starobrat-Hermelin and Tadeusz Kozielec; Magnesium Research, Vol.10, No.2, IW7, pp.149-156.
• Assessment of magnesium levels in children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)," Tadeusz Kozielec and Barbara Starobrat-Hermelin; Magnesium Research, Vol. 10, No. 2, 1997, pp. 143-148.

Sound Sensitivity in Autism

Remember the kitchen scene in Rain Man? Food had been left heating on the stove. Before long-smoke. Then the smoke alarm. Raymond Babbitt (Dustin Hoffman) couldn't tolerate the shrieking of the alarm. He covered his ears and went berserk until his brother came rushing to his rescue. That scene, like the rest of Rain Man, was a very authentic depiction of autism. We are all aware of sound sensitivity as a symptom of autism, but few of us have given it much thought and attention. Might sound sensitivity be, in at least some cases, a cause rather than merely a symptom of autism?

Starting in 1964, in the questionnaire which appeared as the appendix to my book “Infantile Autism”, I began asking parents of autistic children to answer questions intended to shed some light on the nature, the diagnosis, and perhaps the possible cause of autism. Several questions concerned sound sensitivity. Now, in late 1990, with nearly 12,000 such questionnaires in our computer files, it is very evident that sound sensitivity is a salient feature of close to 40% of all cases of autism. In many cases the problem is so acute that the parents have phoned or written the Institute for Child Behavior Research in desperation, @ some means of alleviating the problem. One infant screamed in pain unless his mother closed the drapes very slowly and silently.

In his book Autism: The Ultimate Stranger, Carl Delacato devoted several pages to the problem of hyperacute hearing (as well as other hyperacute senses). Philip Ney, a Canadian psychiatrist, had written several papers over a decade ago in which he proposed that hyperacute hearing might be a cause, and not just a symptom, of many cases of autism. More recently, in “Emergence: Labeled Autistic”, Temple Grandin vividly describes the pain caused by her hypersensitive hearing. To her, speech sounded “like an onrushing freight train.”

How can I improve sensitivity to loud sounds?
Delacato suggests the use of earplugs a means of diminishing the discomfort of autistic children who cannot tolerate loud sounds or certain frequencies. Earplugs, cotton, rubber, or plastic, have been helpful in some cases, as have been the kinds of heavy-duty industrial protective ear covers worn by workers who must work around jet engines or in other noisy environments. However, many autistic children refuse to wear these devices, and of course muffling die sounds diminishes the child's ability to hear speech and receive other important auditory information. One mother of an autistic child with hyperacute hearing, an engineer, designed a small soundproof (anechoic) chamber, which was reportedly extremely effective in excluding environmental noise, so her son could sleep. She constructed the soundproof mini-chamber from a card table, some velcro-fastening tape, and the foam mattress pads that are corrugated in several directions, like an egg crate. The foam was secured to the bottom surface of the card table, and to the legs of the table, so the table could be placed, cave-like, on the child's bed while he slept.

One cause of sound sensitivity is a deficiency of the mineral magnesium. We all need several hundred milligrams of magnesium each day. Unfortunately our food supply can no longer be expected to provide that much. One symptom of magnesium deficiency is hypersensitive hearing, and hyperirritability in general. Magnesium supplements are readily available, and an appropriate amount would be about 20 milligrams for each 10 pounds of body weight, per day. (Thus, 100 mg of magnesium for a 50 pound child.)

If magnesium deficiency is the cause of the sound sensitivity, improvement will be seen in a very few days. [6]

Auditory Training
Can autistic individuals with hyperacute hearing be trained to overcome the hypersensitivity? Possibly so. Two French physicians, Alfred Tomatis and Guy Berard, have independently pioneered approaches, which involve the use of electronic devices to modulate sounds in such a way that hypersensitive hearing, and certain other hearing problems, can be remedied.

Tomatis Listening Centers, which administer sound treatment in accordance with Tomatis' teachings, are found in many cities in Europe and North America.

Unlike Tomatis, Berard has conducted his work only from his clinic in Annecy, although the electronic sound modulating device he has developed is being used by a few practitioners elsewhere.

Although both Tomatis and Bernd treat a variety of problems, dyslexia in particular, which they attribute, at least in many cases, to faulty auditory processing, autistic patients represent only a small part of the practices of the Tomatis Centers, and of Berard. Nevertheless, a member of families with autistic children have had their children treated by Tomatis or Berard with what are surprisingly often positive evaluations.

The Berard treatment consists of 10 hours of listening to music, which has been played through Berard's electronic modulating device. The patient is first given a careful audiogram by Berard to the peaks on the audiogram. Berard points out that audiograms am typically concerned with the valley&-the areas of impaired auditory acuity-with very little attention paid to the peaks which represent the frequencies at which the hearing is hyperacute, and therefore quite possibly a source of pain or discomfort. Based on the results of the audiometric testing, Berard sets the frequency filters on his device so that the patient is protected from hearing the sounds to which he or she is hypersensitive. Specially-selected music is played through earphones into both ears. The electronic circuitry has been designed so that the music entering each ear is briefly interrupted and restarted in an unpredictable pattern. One might say that the entire hearing apparatus is thus exercised by the electronically modified music, which is played rather loudly, but not loudly enough to be painful or uncomfortable.

The 10 hours of Berard's treatment are usually divided into 20 half hour sessions, given over 10-day period. A second audiometric test is generally conducted at the end of a fifth day, so that the filters may be reset, depending on the effects of the first five days (10 sessions) of auditory training. The Tomatis approach, which is based on psychophilosophical concepts quite different from Berard's, may involve 100-150 hours listening to electronically modulated music, over a period of several months. Frankly, I am rather uncomfortable with the Tomatis approach. Not only is it far longer more expensive than Berard's, but it invokes a number of assumptions, I found hard to accept such as the significance he places on the sound of the mother's voice on the auditory and emotional development of the fetus.

To my knowledge there have been no scientifically controlled evaluations of either the Berard or Tomatis auditory training procedures, as they are applied to autism, or for it matter, any other of the various disabilities for which the Berard and Tomatis methods are recommended, although a number of small clinical trials are reported in the literature supplied by Berard and Tomatis. The Institute for Child Behavior Research has been in contact with a number of parents in the U.S. and elsewhere whose autistic children have been treated by the Berard and Tomatis methods, and, as noted above, the parent evaluations are surprisingly favorable. At the time of this writing, a double-blind, placebo controlled evaluation of Berard training on a sample of autistic children is being conducted by my colleague Dr. Stephen Edelson and myself. The results of this first experimental evaluation of Auditory training are expected to be available by raid-1991.

During my three decades of work in the field of autism, I have met quite a number of high functioning autistic adults, including some who have earned college degrees and even postgraduate degrees in various fields. In all cases but one there were residual behavioral eccentricities and oddities. The only exception was a young woman who had graduated from college with honors and was working toward her Ph.D. when I met her. After spending several hours with her I could find no sign of autism, yet this young woman as a child had been hospitalized on the autism ward in Bellevue, and her records indicated clearly that she had been diagnosed autistic-appropriately so-as a child. This woman's family attributed her recovery entirely to her having been treated for 10 hours by Dr. Berard. Her story is told in the book The Sound of a Miracle by her mother, Annabel Stehli, which is in press at the time of this writing, and which is condensed in the December 1990 Readers Digest.

If the reader is skeptical that something so simple as 10 hours of auditory training might be sufficient to bring even a small minority of autistic individuals to full recovery, over a period of time, I can assure you that I am no less skeptical. On the other hand, to permit such skepticism (prejudice) to remove a treatment modality from consideration without thorough investigation would be inexcusable, in my view.

Dr. Berard retired in April 1990. At present, his method of auditory treatment is not available. However, we at ICBR are working on several options which we hope will be helpful, but which it would be premature to discuss at this time. Parents of autistic children and adults with hypersensitive hearing will find information about treatment options in the ARRL as such information becomes available. If the problem is acute, write to ICBR, and we will send the information more quickly and in greater detail. In the meantime, any readers with additional suggestions on methods for dealing with hyperacute hearing are invited to share them with ARRI readers. [6]