Category: English

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By John Joseph Chin, Assistant Teaching Professor of Strategy and Technology, Carnegie Mellon University

Those who rise to power through a coup often fall by the same means.

That is one of the takeaways from events in Madagascar, where on Oct. 14, 2025, the military seized power after weeks of protests largely driven by Gen Z. Ironically, it was the same elite military unit that helped bring Andry Rajoelina, former mayor of the capital Antananarivo, to power in a March 2009 coup that now supported anti-government protesters and ultimately forced the president to flee.

I lead a research team that compiles the Colpus Dataset of coup types and characteristics and have written on the history of coups d’état from 1946 through 2025.

Our data suggests that even as coups have declined globally overall, coup risk remains comparatively high in Africa. Since 2020, the continent has now seen 10 successful coups across eight countries.

But the military takeover in Madagascar marks only the second coup in that period to take place outside of the Sahel region, stretching from the Atlantic to the Horn of Africa – a signal that Africa’s coup problem is becoming a continental one.

But why do some coups succeed and others fail? And why do Madagascar and various states in Africa have trouble escaping so-called coup traps?

Our data provides some answers. But first it is worth exploring what we mean when we use the term coup.

What is a coup?

A coup d’état is a seizure of executive power involving one or more concrete, observable and illegal actions by security personnel or civilian officials.

Here, Madagascar’s military takeover appears to qualify. Despite claims by the country’s new military leader, Col. Michael Randrianirina, that he had an order from the High Constitutional Court legitimizing his seizure of power, this seemed to be contradicted by statements a day earlier that Randrianirina’s military council had suspended the high court’s powers.

That’s not to say that every political event that smells like a coup is, in fact, a coup.

Many coup plots never come to fruition. A bona fide plot may be preempted and the plotters arrested, or plotters may abandon their plan before taking any concrete action. Moreover, sometimes a leader falsely alleges a coup plot to purge members of the government suspected of disloyalty.

A plot without an attempt to oust the leader is not, in our book, a coup.

Conversely, attempts to target a leader without a plan to seize power are not coups. This includes leader assassination attempts by political opponents or lone wolves or mutinies by disgruntled soldiers who might even march on the presidential palace to demand higher pay, promotions or other policy concessions.

Nor do most civilian-led mass uprisings entail coups, even if they are successful in toppling the government. Take Nepal, where in September a Gen Z-led protest turned violent and ousted the government. But there was no coup insofar as the military remained quartered rather than actively joining the protests or issuing a threat to compel the prime minister to resign.

However, some revolutions and coups do co-occur, resulting in a “coupvolution” or “endgame coup.”

Determining whether a coup accompanies anti-government protests depends on how elites and the military behave, not on how violent protesters may be.

In Madagascar, mostly peaceful civilian protests turned into a coup attempt once troops actively joined the demonstrations. That attempt succeeded when Randrianirina, commander of the elite CAPSAT force, claimed the interim presidency and insisted a military council would rule for the time being.

Why do coups succeed?

There have been 601 coup attempts since 1946, according to our database, with 299 being successful – or about 50%. In Africa during that period, 111 out of 225 coup attempts were successful.

Coups come in a variety of forms, with different causes and outcomes, and not all are equally likely to succeed. The events in Madagascar, however, tick many of the boxes associated with determining coup success.

Coups depend on coordinating a lot of people, while simultaneously preventing the leader from finding out about the plot. Mass protests of the kind that rocked Madagascar in recent weeks provide cover – as well as motive and opportunity – for coup plotters.

Counterintuitively, military force is rarely decisive. In a typical coup attempt, much of the military remains neutral, biding its time to see whether the leader or coupists will prevail. Consequently, the perceived momentum of events influences how the military rank and file react: If they think the coupmakers will succeed, they typically join; if they think the coup will fail, they generally oppose it.

A coup’s momentum depends on a variety of factors, including the identity, location and strategy of coup leaders, as well as domestic and international reactions to the coup.

Coups that are launched by government insiders and senior military officers in the capital and are nonviolent and result in pro-coup mass mobilization are the most likely to succeed. By contrast, coups that are launched by government outsiders and junior officers outside the capital and are bloody and generate fierce anti-coup mass mobilization are the most likely to fail.

Coup violence is inversely correlated with success. When no force is threatened – usually because the security forces remain united under a senior command – coups succeed 85% of the time.

By contrast, less than 40% of coups that escalate into civil-war levels of violence – that is, resulting in over 1,000 fatalities – succeed.

In Madagascar, we saw the involvement of government elites and senior officers in the capital, mass pro-coup mobilization, low levels of coup violence and a history of prior successful coups – all of which make coup success likely.

Madagascar is not alone

Since 2020, military actors have also taken power in coups in Burkina Faso, Chad, Gabon, Guinea, Mali, Niger and Sudan.

So why are so many African countries prone to falling into a coup trap?

Scholars have asked this question for decades. Development economist Paul Collier suggests that Africa is the most coup-prone region because it is the poorest region of the world, and it is poverty and low growth – and associated political violence – that drive coups.

Others have pointed to high levels of ethnic diversity, and a history of ethnic exclusion and ethnic militaries, as long-standing drivers of coups on the continent.

But since 2020, a number of other factors also appear to be driving up structural coup risk on the continent. Many African countries have seen declining trust in public institutions and leaders and a rise of terrorist violence, which have generated mass popularity for recent coups on the continent.

Anti-coup norms have also weakened in recent years. International pressure to restore civilian rule was quite strong in the 1990s and 2000s, contributing to the decline of African military coups. But new post-coup African governments appear more resilient to sanctions, are cooperating more with each other and are able to draw on the support of authoritarian “patrons,” notably Russia and China.

As a result, African post-coup governments are staying in power longer, which in turn emboldens coup plotters elsewhere who see a more permissive environment.

So even if there are limits to Africa’s “coup contagion,” Madagascar likely won’t be the last domino to fall, given structural conditions on the continent.

John Joseph Chin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Madagascar’s military power grab shows Africa’s coup problem isn’t restricted to the Sahel region – https://theconversation.com/madagascars-military-power-grab-shows-africas-coup-problem-isnt-restricted-to-the-sahel-region-267581

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Alex Beattie, Lecturer, Media and Communication, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

A wave of proposed social media bans for young people has swept the globe recently, fuelled by mounting concern about the apparent harm the likes of TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat can cause to vulnerable minds.

Australia was the first to announce restrictions on people under 16 having a social media account. New Zealand may soon follow, and Denmark’s prime minister recently declared her country would ban social media for under-15s, accusing mobile phones and social networks of “stealing our children’s childhood”.

The moves are part of a growing international trend: the United Kingdom, France, Norway, Pakistan and the United States are now considering or implementing similar restrictions, often requiring parental consent or digital ID verification.

At first glance, these policies appear to be about protecting young people from mental health harm, explicit content and addictive design. But beneath the language of safety lies something else: a shift in cultural values.

The bans reflect a kind of moral turn, one that risks reviving conservative notions that predate the internet. Might we be entering a new Victorian era of the internet, where the digital lives of young people are reshaped not just by regulation but by a reassertion of moral control?

Policing moral decline

The Victorian era was marked by rigid social codes, modest dress and formal communication. Public behaviour was tightly regulated, and schools were seen as key sites for socialising children into gender and class hierarchies.

Today, we see echoes of this in the way “digital wellness” is framed. Screen-time apps, detox retreats and “dumb” phones are marketed as tools for cultivating a “healthy” digital life – often with moral undertones. The ideal user is calm, focused and restrained. The impulsive, distracted or emotionally expressive user is pathologised.

This framing is especially evident in the work of Jonathan Haidt, psychologist and author of The Anxious Generation, a central text in the age-restriction movement. Haidt argues that social media accelerates performative behaviour and emotional dysregulation in young people.

Viewed this way, youth digital life involves declining psychological resilience, rising polarisation and the erosion of shared civic values, rather than being a symptom of complex developmental or technological shifts. This has helped popularise the idea that social media is not just harmful but corrupting.

Yet the data behind these claims is contested. Critics have pointed out that Haidt’s conclusions often rely on correlational studies and selective interpretations.

For example, while some research links heavy social media use to anxiety and depression, other studies suggest the effects are modest and vary widely depending on context, platform and individual differences.

What’s missing from much of the debate is a recognition of young people’s agency, or their ability to navigate online spaces intelligently, creatively and socially.

Indeed, youth digital life is not just about passive consumption. It’s a site of literacy, expression and connection. Platforms such as TikTok and YouTube have fostered a renaissance of oral and visual communication.

Young people stitch together memes, remix videos and engage in rapid-fire editing to produce new forms of storytelling. These are not signs of decline but evolving literacies. To regulate youth access without acknowledging these skills risks suppressing the new in favour of preserving the familiar.

Regulate platforms, not young people

This is where the Victorian metaphor becomes useful. Just as Victorian norms sought to maintain a particular social order, today’s age restrictions risk enforcing a narrow vision of what digital life should look like.

On the surface, terms such as “brain rot” appear to convey the harm of excessive internet use. But in practice, they’re often used by teenagers to laugh about and resist the pressures of 24/7 hustle culture.

But concerns about young people’s digital habits seem rooted in a fear of cognitive difference – the idea that some users are too impulsive, too irrational, too deviant.

Young people are often cast as unable to communicate properly, hiding behind screens, avoiding phone calls. But these changing habits reflect broader shifts in how we relate to technology. The expectation to be always available, always responsive, ties us to our devices in ways that make switching off genuinely difficult.

Age restrictions may address some symptoms, but they don’t tackle the underlying design of platforms that are built to keep us scrolling, sharing and generating data.

If society and governments are serious about protecting young people, perhaps the better strategy is to regulate the digital platforms. Legal scholar Eric Goldman calls the age-restriction approach a “segregate and suppress” strategy – one that punishes youth rather than holding platforms accountable.

We would never ban children from playgrounds, but we do expect those spaces to be safe. Where are the safety barriers for digital spaces? Where is the duty of care from digital platforms?

The popularity of social media bans suggests a resurgence of conservative values in our digital lives. But protection should not come at the cost of autonomy, creativity or expression.

For many, the internet has become a moral battleground where values around attention, communication and identity are fiercely contested. But it is also a social infrastructure, one that young people are already shaping through new literacies and forms of expression.

Shielding them from it risks suppressing the very skills and voices that could help us build a better digital future.

Alex Beattie receives funding from The Royal Society Te Apārangi. He is a recipient of a Marsden Fast Start Grant.

– ref. As social media age restrictions spread, is the internet entering its Victorian era? – https://theconversation.com/as-social-media-age-restrictions-spread-is-the-internet-entering-its-victorian-era-267610

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Jan Lanicek, Associate Professor in Modern European History and Jewish History, UNSW Sydney

In November 2025, cinemas worldwide will release Nuremberg, a courtroom drama directed by James Vanderbilt. The film focuses on the International Military Tribunal against 24 major Nazi war criminals (though two were ultimately not tried) and seven Nazi organisations – including the SS, the Gestapo and the general staff of the army – at the end of the second world war.

Its release coincides with the 80th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials, which officially opened on October 18 1945. The film explores our desire to see justice and reckoning for those who committed war crimes against civilian populations in the past and present.

The plot centres on the confrontation between Hermann Göring (played by Russell Crowe), a leading Nazi on trial, and psychiatrist Douglas M. Kelley (played by Rami Malek). Kelley’s task was to examine whether the top Nazis were fit to stand trial.

Nuremberg is often called “history’s greatest trial”. It was the first international trial that held senior governmental officials accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed across Europe. It also established individual responsibility for committing war crimes, rejecting the defence of following the orders of superiors.

The indictment covered Nazi crimes before and during the war, against both soldiers and civilians. Nuremberg happened in a unique moment in time, when a country that triggered a major war was completely crushed by a military alliance willing to enforce its “unconditional surrender”.

It was also during the short time before the outbreak of the Cold War, when the wartime alliance between the East and West still held together. Such a trial seems unlikely to be repeated in our current historical moment.

What were the Nuremberg trials?

The International Military Tribunal, which held its hearings in Nuremberg, Germany, lasted for almost a year, until October 1946. It was the first in a series of 13 trials that brought to justice representatives of all the Nazi political, military and business elites, as well as mid-ranking representatives of the army, medical professionals and other Nazi agencies.

The reckoning was comprehensive, even though with the developing Cold War, the Western allies soon lost their appetite for further trials.

The Allies chose Nuremberg as the place for the trials for both political and practical reasons. Nuremberg was one of the centres of the Nazi movement. Numerous political rallies and parades took place there during Hitler’s rule. Also, the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg was one of the few suitable buildings that survived the near total destruction of Germany. It had the facilities needed for a major international tribunal.

Besides Göring, the defendants at the first trial included the Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, military commanders Wilhelm Keitel and Alfred Jodl and armament minister Albert Speer. It also included the vicious antisemite Julius Streicher, and head of the Reich Security Main Office, Ernst Kaltenbrunner – the man in charge of the Nazi policies of persecution.

Several top representatives of Nazi Germany escaped justice: Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels had died by suicide.

In popular memory, the Holocaust or Shoah, the mass extermination of the European Jews, is now commemorated as the main symbol of Nazi atrocities. But historians offer a mixed assessment of the role the Holocaust played during the Nuremberg trial.

While the persecution of the Jews did not dominate the proceedings, their fate was repeatedly emphasised as one of the Nazi crimes. Three Jewish survivors personally testified in the courtroom, reminding the world about the death of approximately six million Jews and incarceration of hundreds of thousands more who survived the ordeal of the camps.

In the courtroom, the prosecution played the footage from the liberated concentration camps, including Belsen and Buchenwald, which shook the audience – including the defendants. Defence witness Rudolf Höss, former commandant of Auschwitz, described the killing process in the gas chambers and crematoria in detail.

The Nazis’ persecution of other minorities received minimum coverage in the main trial. In addition to Jewish people, they also persecuted the Romani people, disabled people, homosexuals and religious minority groups.

Earlier efforts at international justice

Previous efforts to bring leaders of defeated states to justice and establish their accountability had been relatively unsuccessful. The Versailles Peace Treaty in 1919, for instance, promised to bring German leaders to justice for suspected war crimes during the first world war, though the effort never really materialised.

In the Soviet Union, trials of Nazi war criminals and local collaborators had already begun during the second world war. In 1943, the Krasnodar and Kharkov trials sentenced most defendants to death. In late 1944, a Soviet–Polish court sentenced guards from the Majdanek concentration camp to death. Further local trials continued in the first post-war months by the allied militaries, and new political authorities in the liberated countries.

But Nuremberg was the main piece in the puzzle of a comprehensive, often brutal retribution and cleansing all over Europe that brought tens of thousands of war criminals and collaborators to justice. Not only Germans, but also representatives of occupied nations accused of war crimes and collaboration, sat in the dock. Nazi war crimes trials, on a smaller scale, continued for decades.

In fact, just a few years ago, in 2022, 97-year-old Irmgard Furchner, a former secretary at a Nazi concentration camp, Stutthof, was found guilty of complicity in the murder of more than 10,500 people. She received a two-year suspended sentence.

‘History will judge us’

Nuremberg’s significance was political, legal, moral and historical. The tribunal prosecuting major war criminals “whose offenses have no particular geographical location” was jointly led by the four main Allied powers: the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and France. Each had representatives among the judges and prosecution teams. The prosecutors also represented the interests of other, minor allies, such as Poland or Czechoslovakia, who could provide evidence for the trial.

The indictment listed four counts: conspiracy to commit crimes, crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. In the first trial, 22 Nazis were in the dock.

In his opening speech, US Chief of Counsel for Nuremberg, Justice Robert H. Jackson, stressed:

the wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated.

He continued, “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow.”

The confirmation of the Nazi crimes that came with the liberation of Europe had shocked the world. When pushing the Wehrmacht (the armed forces of Germany’s Third Reich) from the east and west, seasoned Allied troops liberated destroyed villages and towns, coming across evidence of mass murder of civilians. In 1944 and 1945, the Red Army and western Allies liberated Nazi concentration camps, confirming the mass extermination of Jews and other groups.

At Nuremberg, the charge of “crimes against humanity”, in particular, punished crimes against civilians, such as “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts”. The promoter of this term was lawyer Hersch Lauterpacht, who was born in Galicia (then part of Austria-Hungary) and lived in the UK.

A competing legal terminology had been developed by another Galician-born lawyer, based in the US, Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide”. While the concept supported by Lauterpacht focused on the persecution of individuals, Lemkin stressed that the Nazi crimes were committed with the intent to destroy whole groups, particularly the Jews.

Although Nuremberg mentioned genocide on several occasions, the judges preferred “crimes against humanity” when characterising Nazi crimes. This legal concept allowed the Allies to punish German leaders for the persecution of their own citizens, even before the war.

As international lawyer and author Philippe Sands has said, this decision mean that “no longer would a state be free to treat its people entirely as it wished”.

A refined version of Lemkin’s term for genocide was officially enshrined in international law by the United Nations in 1948. It has been criticised for establishing a high threshold of proof. As a result, only a few cases of mass violence against civilians meet the criteria.

There were several notable moments during the trial. Göring, the former head of the Luftwaffe (German airforce), was considered the main defendant, and dominated the trial. Eventually, he had to be isolated from the other defendants, to allow them to speak more freely.

His questioning by Justice Jackson has been characterised as one of the worst cross-examinations in history. US attorney Robert Hedrick said, in 2016, that Göring was a “slippery” witness, who often complained about the translation of questions to buy time to think of an answer – and Jackson “did not control his witness”. But the prosecution had enough evidence to sentence him to death on all four counts, including crimes against humanity.

Rudolf Hess, deputy leader of the Nazi Party, escaped on a plane to Britain in 1941, allegedly with the aim to negotiate peace. He was imprisoned and kept in custody until the end of the war. In Nuremberg, Hess claimed amnesia and mental problems to avoid accountability for his crimes. In the end, he was sentenced to life in prison and died at Spandau prison in Berlin, in 1987.

Architect Albert Speer, who from 1942 became Hitler’s armament minister, cooperated with the court. He expressed remorse for the crimes he committed, though denied any knowledge of the Holocaust. These claims have later been disputed.

For instance, in 1971, Harvard University historian Erich Goldhagen found that Speer had attended a conference of senior Nazis in October 1943, at which SS head Himmler had spoken openly about “the extermination of the Jewish people”. (Though his biographer couldn’t confirm he had heard the speech in person, she concluded “he knew”.) He was sentenced to 20 years and was released in 1966, aged 61.

The judges sentenced 12 defendants to the death penalty. Martin Bormann, the head of the Nazi Party Chancellery and Secretary to Hitler, was sentenced in absentia. Although it was believed he was at large, it was later confirmed he died in the battle of Berlin in early May 1945.

Three defendants, Hitler’s minister of economics Hjalmar Schacht, propagandist Hans Fritzsche, and Hitler’s erstwhile conservative ally Franz von Papen were acquitted, despite the protest of the Soviet judge. Göring, sentenced to death, escaped justice by dying by suicide the night the execution was ordered.

International war crimes trials since Nuremberg

Nuremberg was the first major international trial for war crimes. It was followed by others. At around the same time, beginning in 1946, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East met in Tokyo, judging Japanese war criminals. The Tokyo Charter closely followed the Nuremberg Charter.

In the 1990s, in the post-Cold War period, the UN Security Council established two more ad hoc international criminal tribunals.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was set up in the Hague, for war criminals from the wars in the former Yugoslavia. Its mandate lasted from 1993 to 2017. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda convened in Arusha, Tanzania, to prosecute persons responsible for genocide and war crimes in the Rwandan civil war, committed in 1994. Both men and women were sentenced to long prison terms at these trials, including for the crime of genocide.

In 2002, the UN General Assembly approved the creation of the permanent International Criminal Court (ICC). Based on the Rome statute, the ICC can judge genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of aggression. However, some of the major world powers, such as the US, Russia, China and India, do not recognise its jurisdiction and do not cooperate with the court.

The ICC is currently investigating several states and their leaders, including Russia, Israel and a Hamas representative. Usually, only heads of smaller states, who lack strong international partners, sit in the dock. More powerful actors ignore the extradition requests, accusing the court of either pro-western bias, “neo-colonialist repression” or antisemitism.

Almost 80% of all indictments issued by the court have been against African leaders. The court has not opened one single case against leaders from the West.

Because of the indictment against Israeli leaders, the US has threatened the court with sanctions, and Hungary has withdrawn from the ICC. The ICC lacks the instruments to enforce extradition and can only rely on members’ cooperation. State leaders sought by the ICC travel relatively freely around the world, visiting major international states including permanent members of the UN Security Council.

Could the Nuremberg trials happen today?

A major trial of international significance – comparable to the Nuremberg Trials – would only be possible in the case of a major military defeat of the investigated government, and its occupation by those willing to bring the leading politicians to justice.

This is unlikely to happen. Countries are unwilling to extradite their leaders to international courts, unless they are coerced by circumstances. Many prefer to settle the scores on their home turf.

The Allies organised the Nuremberg trials with the hope of bringing the horrible chapter of Nazism to an end and sending a clear message for the future. The destruction, war crimes and crimes against humanity revealed at the end of the war truly shocked the world.

Even so, the East and West were only able to meet and sentence the German leaders during this brief historical moment before the outbreak of the Cold War.

With growing divisions in the world today, another Nuremberg is unlikely to happen any time soon.

Jan Lanicek receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. Friday essay: the Nuremberg Trials at 80 – could such a reckoning ever happen again? – https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-nuremberg-trials-at-80-could-such-a-reckoning-ever-happen-again-267313

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Nial Wheate, Professor, School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University

Magnesium supplements are everywhere – lined up on pharmacy shelves and promoted on wellness blogs and social media.

Maybe you have a friend or family member who swears a daily tablet will help everything, from better sleep to alleviating muscle cramps.

But do you really need one? Or it is just marketing hype?

What is magnesium and why do we need it?

Magnesium is an essential metal the body needs to make and operate more than 300 different enzymes.

These enzymes build protein, and regulate muscle and nerve function, help in the release of energy from our food, and help to maintain blood function. The body doesn’t produce magnesium so we need to get it from external sources.

The government recommends a daily magnesium dose of 310–420 mg a day for adults and 30–410 mg for children, depending on age and sex.

This is easily met through a good diet. Foods rich in magnesium include nuts and seeds, whole grains, seafood, meat, legumes and green leafy vegetables.

You can even get some of your magnesium needs met through dark chocolate. It has 146 mg per 100 g of chocolate.

How do I know if I’m deficient?

People at risk of experiencing magnesium deficiency include people with restricted diets, gastrointestinal problems such as Crohn’s and coeliac diseases, type 2 diabetes, and alcohol dependence. Older adults are also more likely to be deficient.

You will only need a magnesium supplement if you show signs of low magnesium. One of the most common signs is muscle spasms and twitches. Other symptoms to look out for include low appetite, nausea and vomiting, or your heart beating abnormally.

Magnesium deficiency can be properly diagnosed by a blood test ordered by your doctor. If you need this test, it’s covered by Medicare.

What conditions can it help?

Commercially available magnesium supplements have been promoted to prevent muscle cramps, manage insomnia and help with migraines.

While magnesium deficiency is linked to muscle cramps, the cause of most muscle cramps is unknown.

And the current evidence does not demonstrate that magnesium supplements can prevent muscle cramps in older adults.

There is conflicting data as to whether the use of magnesium helps with sleep. One study reported magnesium was able to reduce the time for a person to fall asleep by 17.4 minutes while others didn’t show an effect.

For migraines, the most recent research suggests taking 122-600 mg of magnesium supplements daily for 4–24 weeks may decrease their frequency and severity.

Are magnesium supplements safe?

Magnesium supplements are generally well tolerated.

However, they can cause gastrointestinal discomfort such as nausea, abdominal cramping and diarrhoea. Magnesium causes diarrhoea by drawing water into the intestine and stimulating movement in the gut.

It is possible to take too much magnesium and you can overdose on it. Very large doses, around 5,000 mg per day, can lead to magnesium toxicity.

Most of the research investigating the clinical use of magnesium focuses on magnesium in oral formulations.

What other formulations are available?

As magnesium is a small metal ion, it can pass through skin – but not easily.

Magnesium bath salts, patches and topical cream-based formulations may be able to raise your blood magnesium levels to some extent.

But due to the amount needed each day, tablets and foods are a better source.

Things to watch out for when taking magnesium

Commercially available magnesium products can vary widely in dose, formulation and cost. Magnesium supplements have between 150 to 350 mg of the metal per tablet. Your required dose will depend on your age and sex, and whether you have any underlying health problems.

Magnesium supplements sometimes contain other vitamins and minerals, such as vitamins C and D, and the metals calcium, chromium and manganese. So it’s important to consider the total quantities if you’re taking other vitamins and supplements.

Many magnesium supplements also include vitamin B6. While this vitamin is important for supporting the immune system, high intakes can it can cause serious health issues. If you’re already taking a B6 supplement, a magnesium supplement that also includes it can put you at risk.

What if you’re considering supplements?

If you think you might be deficient in magnesium, speak to your doctor who can order a blood test.

If you suffer from migraines, cramps, or poor sleep, talk to your doctor or pharmacist who can advise on and monitor the underlying cause. It may be that a change in lifestyle or an alternative treatment may be more appropriate for you.

If you do decide to take a magnesium supplement, check you won’t be taking too much of any other vitamin or mineral. A pharmacist can help select a supplement that suits you best.

Nial Wheate in the past has received funding from the ACT Cancer Council, Tenovus Scotland, Medical Research Scotland, Scottish Crucible, and the Scottish Universities Life Sciences Alliance. He is a fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute. Nial is the chief scientific officer of Vaihea Skincare LLC, a director of SetDose Pty Ltd (a medical device company) and was previously a Standards Australia panel member for sunscreen agents. He is a member of the Haleon Australia Pty Ltd Pain Advisory Board. Nial regularly consults to industry on issues to do with medicine risk assessments, manufacturing, design and testing.

Wai-Jo Jocelin Chan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Should I take a magnesium supplement? Will it help me sleep or prevent muscle cramps? – https://theconversation.com/should-i-take-a-magnesium-supplement-will-it-help-me-sleep-or-prevent-muscle-cramps-267542