Hypomagnesaemia: a modifiable risk factor of diabetic nephropathy

Diabetes mellitus (DM) is a heterogeneous disease characterised by an absolute or relative deficiency of insulin and insulin resistance. Diabetes is occurring at younger age in India. It is estimated that 20% of the type 2 DM patients reach end-stage renal disease (ESRD) during their lifetime. Recently, it has been proposed that hypomagnesaemia is a novel factor implicated in the pathogenesis of diabetic complications. Considering this, a study was designed to estimate the prevalence and association of hypomagnesaemia with diabetic nephropathy in North Indian population.

The investigated clinical group composed of 100 type 2 diabetics, grouped into two, on the basis of presence or absence of diabetic nephropathy with n=50 each. Biochemical investigations including fasting blood sugar (BS-F), blood urea, creatinine, magnesium (Mg), urinary albumin-creatinine ratio (U-A/C ratio) were carried out. Descriptive statistics was applied to described frequency and means. χ2-Test and Student's t-tests were used to analyze associations between categorical and continuous variables, respectively. Pearson's correlation was done to find the association of nephropathy with hypomagnesaemia.

We observed that 37% of diabetic patients had hypomagnesaemia (mean=1.40±0.16 mg/dL). There was also a significantly higher prevalence of hypomagnesaemia (52%) in DM nephropathy patients (mean=1.62±0.31 mg/dL) compared to without nephropathy patients (22%, mean=1.86±0.28 mg/dL). Serum magnesium levels were significantly inversely correlated with serum creatinine (r=-0.222, p=0.026) and U-A/C ratio (r=-0.352, p=0.000), and positively correlated with glomerular filtration rate (GFR) (r=0.304, p=0.002).

We concluded that hypomagnesaemia was significantly associated with higher prevalence of diabetic nephropathy and can be used as a marker for the risk of development of diabetic nephropathy.