The synergy between magnesium and vitamin D is critical for optimal immune function and overall health—especially as it pertains to lowering your risk of COVID-19. Previous studies have also highlighted the role this duo plays in cognitive function among older adults, as well as overall mortality.

Using NHANES data from 2,984 participants over the age of 60, the researchers compared serum vitamin D status and dietary magnesium intake against cognitive function scores.

After adjusting for confounding factors, including total calorie consumption and magnesium intake, higher blood levels of vitamin D positively correlated with decreased odds of having a low cognitive function score on the Digit Symbol Substitution Test.

“It has now been discovered that magnesium is a critical player in the activation of nerve channels that are involved in synaptic plasticity. That means that magnesium is critical for the physiological events that are fundamental to the processes of learning and memory,” he wrote in an article on his website.

We now know COVID-19 patients report a host of neurological effects, from inability to taste or smell, to strokes, seizures, and delirium. Many report being confused or disoriented at discharge.

A previous COVID-19 infection is also associated with a new psychiatric diagnosis, which may be due to stroke due to blood clot in the brain, according to researchers in the United Kingdom, the Post reported.

The Post reported how Isaac Solomon, a neuropathologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, set out to investigate where the virus might be embedding itself in the brain using available data and anecdotal reports.

“He conducted autopsies of 18 consecutive deaths, taking slices of key areas: the cerebral cortex (the gray matter responsible for information processing), thalamus (modulates sensory inputs), basal ganglia (responsible for motor control) and others.”

Interestingly, while doctors and researchers initially suspected that brain inflammation was causing the neurological problems seen in some patients, Solomon’s autopsies found very little inflammation. Instead, these neurological manifestations appear to be the result of brain damage caused by oxygen deprivation.

Signs of oxygen deprivation were present both in patients who had spent a significant amount of time in intensive care, and those who died suddenly after a short but severe bout of illness. I believe this is likely due to increases in clotting in the brain microvasculature.

The researchers hypothesized that magnesium supplementation increases your vitamin D level by activating more of it and that your mortality risk might therefore be lowered by increasing magnesium intake. That is indeed what they found. According to the authors:

“High intake of total, dietary or supplemental magnesium was independently associated with significantly reduced risks of vitamin D deficiency and insufficiency respectively.”

In other words, magnesium intake has a positive impact on vitamin D levels.  This also appears to have a role in disease formation, according to the study.

“The associations of serum 25(OH)D with mortality, particularly due to cardiovascular disease (CVD) and colorectal cancer, were modified by magnesium intake, and the inverse associations were primarily present among those with magnesium intake above the median.”

Personally, I believe many may benefit from amounts as high as 1 to 2 grams (1,000 to 2,000 mg) of elemental magnesium per day, as most of us have EMF exposures that simply cannot be mitigated, and the extra magnesium may help lower the damage from that exposure.

My personal recommendation is that unless you have kidney disease and are on dialysis, continually increase your magnesium dose until you have loose stools and then cut it back. You want the highest dose you can tolerate and still have normal bowel movements.