basically 1. start learning about how to really do healthy diet properly,
2. take regular healthy maintenance supplements while you learn how to do healthy diet properly and
3. take high dose therapeutic supplements, to restore tissue nutrient stores which have been ever more depleted over the last 15 yrs (now i am 11 years in to climbing out of that hole)
when i did d3 for years without understanding cofactors, having had low mag all my life anyway but not realizing, i really ran my magnesium tank dry. that was one that i really had to supplement hard in addition to diet. it was years before i could take a day off from mag supplements without feeling it immediately.
day to day life delivers about 20% of the magnesium to your average person than it did 100 yrs ago.
nowadays i work really hard at getting loads of mag from food and fluids, and take the high quality mag glycinate supplement as well.
cal and mag compete for absorption, so that pair is about balance. personally, i did try to take calcium at one time, but it made my kidneys hurt. i also don't tend to see red flags about calcium and ms. it's always b12, d3, magnesium, zinc, the copper zinc ratio, and not as an essential nutrient but as an indicator, uric acid level. never hurts to know serum ferritin either.
i do think i'm okay for calcium via diet, and i think it's been overhyped a bit while the magnesium part of the equation has been ignored in comparison. your cal mag is a 1:1 is that right? if not, you need to watch for that. calcium intake from diet should be NO MORE THAN twice your mag intake. another way to think of it, your mag intake should be AT LEAST half your calcium intake. for mag the intake guideline is 7-10mg/kg body weight per day.
if you do go ahead and have some labs done, be prepared for the results to be normal. they'll just be more likely to be low normal. all kinds of research shows deficiency occurring within the statistical normal range. stats normal does not equal 'not sick' or 'healthy'. it just means 'like most people' so if you have a suite of chronic diseases associated with a culture, as we do, why would you ever consider 'normal' good enough? and yet, that is how it usually flies at the doc's office. just get your own copy of your results, normal or not, and you can dig in from there.
there's a lot of talk about serum magnesium being a useless test. not at all true. it is used all the time in studies and clearly shows differences between patient groups and controls. the only problem is, the patient range and the healthy range are both inside the broader normal ranges used at labs. so you get a test, it's normal, you think oh well that can't be the problem. but it certainly can be. more excellent research comes out all the time to clarify which serum levels are least likely to be associated with illness.
i learned this 'normal' lesson first via uric acid. heard it was low in ms. had a test. level 194. 'normal' 140-360 umol/L. then i find out ms patients sit right at the 194 point on average, while healthy controls sit up closer to 300. it's like that for every nutrient of concern in ms, and that is without even getting into considering interactions.
re those interactions, for one example i could not budge that uric acid level with diet. i tried for a year at least to eat high purine foods, which also would have been higher in zinc, but i could not get the uric acid to come up. only after supplementing to bring my zinc from 8 to the high teens was i able to move the uric acid number up into the healthy range. it's all fascinating, but frustrating too!
OK i feel you re your vision issues! i had trouble processing too. especially when driving. it's like you can see clearly and it just won't make sense. in my case i could read, but i couldn't decide if it was safe to go through the intersection, or make that lane change on the highway. i asked my neuro if it looked like the damage on my brain scan made sense in terms of having those probs, and he said yes. luckily, that turned out to be one problem that cleared right up after i figured out the zinc issue. so relieved.
re no symptoms and a damning scan, ARG this is exact problem with dxing just via mri. it's established in the lit that people can be dxd with ms on autopsy only, having lived their entire life oblivious and apparently without enough symptoms to have sent them looking for a dx.
you're right about nutrition not being where the cash is at. did you see my last post in 'all things magnesium' LOL a trademarked magnesium product for PMS. IT'S AN ESSENTIAL NUTRIENT OMG. stahp. i feel for your friend and for all who are stuck with the mainstream.
science definitely needs more work. love how magnesium and zinc were just glossed over in Grossman & Wahls (2016):
Evaluation of Dietary Nutrients in Relation to Clinical Outcomes in Chronic-Progressive Multiple Sclerosis
http://advances.nutrition.org/content/7/1/15A.short
just checked again, nope no full text access. my institution does not subscribe to that journal. re 'this is a secondary analysis' where is the first? gimme full text and at least some summary data
oh well. things to consider:
Radiologically isolated syndrome – incidental magnetic resonance imaging findings suggestive of multiple sclerosis, a systematic review
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10. ... 8512451943
"With increasing availability of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), there is also an increase in incidental abnormal findings. MRI findings suggestive of multiple sclerosis in persons without typical multiple sclerosis symptoms and with normal neurological findings are defined as radiologically isolated syndrome (RIS). Half of the persons with RIS have their initial MRI because of headache, and some have a subclinical cognitive impairment similar to that seen in multiple sclerosis. Radiological measurements also show a similarity between RIS and multiple sclerosis. Approximately two-thirds of persons with RIS show radiological progression and one-third develop neurological symptoms during mean follow-up times of up to five years. Cervical cord lesions are important predictors of clinical conversion. Management has to be individualised, but initiation of disease modifying therapy is controversial and not recommended outside of clinical trials since its effects have not been studied in RIS. Future studies should try to establish the prevalence and long-term prognosis of RIS, its impact on quality of life, and define the role of disease modifying therapy in RIS."
A clinical patho-anatomical study of clinically silent multiple sclerosis
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... 811.x/full
This is the first study on the frequency, size, number, and location of plaques in clinically silent MS. Among the present 18 patients in whom MS was unexpectedly diagnosed at autopsy, it had been clinically silent in 13. An estimate of the prevalence of silent MS is about 25% of that diagnosed in vivo. In the silent group, the MS plaques were located mainly in the periventricular areas, and this may explain the silent nature of the disease.
this is why i personally don't give too much of a crap about my own brain mri,. symptoms or no symptoms lol. it's a personal decision for everyone, and one day i might regret the no meds route i have taken, but today, no.
"homonymous inferior quadrantanopia" *backing slowly away from rabbit hole* will look into that more another time! started with this however http://nawrot.psych.ndsu.nodak.edu/Cour ... omoiq.html
