Magnesium Pidolate.

The most-cited support is a 2020 review in Nutrients arguing that pidolate has high bioavailability and good intracellular penetration, and recommending magnesium for headache and migraine ^[1]. ⚠️ Two of its five authors were employed by Sanofi Consumer Health Care, which sells magnesium pidolate, and the review is a narrative one rather than a systematic comparison of salts; that does not make it wrong, and it does mean it is not independent evidence that this salt is better. Against it, a cell study comparing magnesium sulphate, chloride and pidolate found pidolate impaired growth in osteoblast-like cells and concluded it had LOWER bioavailability in them ^[3]. The only pooled clinical evidence specific to oral pidolate comes from sickle cell disease, where a Cochrane review of three placebo-controlled studies found no effect on painful days and no change in plasma or red-cell magnesium, at very low quality of evidence ^[2]. The one place pidolate has looked distinctly good is a 1995 rat model of magnesium-deficiency aggression, where it raised attack latency more than four other salts ^[4]; that is an animal behavioural endpoint from thirty years ago and does not transfer to a person deciding which bottle to buy.

Ordinary magnesium tolerability: loose stools, mild diarrhoea and headache were the adverse events reported in the pidolate arms of the sickle cell trials, and they resolved without stopping treatment ^[2]. Magnesium accumulates in kidney impairment, so anyone with reduced kidney function should not take a magnesium supplement without medical advice. It carries a glutamate-adjacent anion; pyroglutamate is not glutamate and there is no evidence of an excitatory effect, but readers who react to glutamate-containing supplements sometimes ask, and the honest answer is that nobody has tested it.