Letters to the Editor

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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Dear Sir: Don R. Swanson is to be congratulated on his very good essay, "Migraine and Magnesium: Eleven Neglected Connections" (Perspect. Biol. Med. 31[4]:526-537, 1988). My purpose in writing is to illustrate the somewhat different manner by which I reached a similar conclusion. This approach was a mixture of clinical curiosity, limited experiments with both humans and other animal species, and a small array of supportive published data. My work on the issue of magnesium and vascular implications began in 1971 when it became apparent that the time-honored treatment of preeclampsia with magnesium sulfate produced a greater response thanjust "prevention ofconvulsions ." My rather simple experiment concluded that (1) magnesium prolonged clotting times and reduced platelet adhesiveness; and (2) the study group had significantly lower serum magnesium levels than their unaffected counterpart. A hypothesis was generated implicating low magnesium in the etiology of this syndrome [I]. Later, this hypothesis was tested and proved in pregnant ewes and produced a syndrome that is indistinguishable from that of human victims [2]. It was readily apparent that this syndrome, called preeclampsia, was one of generalized vasospasm coupled with platelet activation. It also was clear that magnesium has a basic and favorable effect on both of these features. This was the pattern also of migraine when the platelet activation theory was advanced by Hannington [3]. In 1980, a clinical trial was begun in which the salts of magnesium were given in a dose of 200 mg/day (elemental Mg) for the prophylaxis of common and classic migraine. The early phase included pregnant women and women on oral contraceptives. This work was presented at the Twenty-fourth Annual Meeting of the American College of Nutrition in Cincinnati in September 1983 [4]. To date, 3,000 human subjects have been treated with an 80 percent favorable response. This is the first and only such trial in North America to the best of my knowledge. It is fair to point out that one of the problems in the failure of medical literatures to communicate as alluded to by the Swanson essay is the fact that scientific articles are often denied publication for one reason or another. This was the case for two of my articles cited in this letter. The one that is abstracted [4] has never been published in its entirety. It has been recently published in abbreviated form [5]. An editorial by Altura [6] was cited in the Swanson essay which mentions my clinical trials and in which Altura claims for himself the work Permission to reprint a letter printed in this section may be obtained only from the author. 150 Letters to the Editor on the antiplatelet effect of magnesium. In so doing, he cites one of his own publications that mentions neither coagulation nor platelets. REFERENCES 1.Weaver, K. A possible anticoagulant effect of magnesium in preeclampsia. In Magnesium in Health and Disease, edited by Cantin and Seelig. New York: Spectra, 1980. 2.Weaver, K. Pregnancy-induced hypertension and low birth weight in magnesium deficient ewes. Magnesium 5:191-200, 1986. 3.Hannington, E. Migraine, a blood disorder. Lancet 2:501-503, 1978. 4.Weaver, K. Magnesium and migraine: reversible hypomagnesic coagulative angiopathy , hypothesis and preliminary clinical data (abstr.). J. Am. Coll. Nutr. 2(3): 187-188, 1983. 5.Weaver, K. Magnesium and its role in vascular reactivity and coagulation. Contemp. Nutr. 12(3): 1-2, 1987. 6.Altura, B. M. Calcium antagonist properties of magnesium: implications for antimigraine actions. Magnesium 4:169-175, 1985. Kenneth Weaver Suite 6, 311 Princeton Road Johnson City, Tennessee37601 Dear Sir: In two recent Perspectives articles [1, 2], I have called attention to specialized literatures that do not cite or refer to each other but are linked by arguments that they respectively contain. The combined arguments lead to new inferences that cannot be drawn from the separate literatures [1, 2]. The first of these two articles identified one literature showing that dietary fish oil leads to certain blood changes and a second literature containing evidence that similar changes might benefit patients with Raynaud's disease. Yet these two literatures were "noninteractive"—that is, they had no articles in common, did...

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