Muscle Spasms and How Potassium Can Help You with Them

Muscle spasms can be terrible to bear and they can affect your life in many ways, especially when they turn out to be a chronic condition.

However, you should know that in most of the cases you can relieve yourself from pain and that the first thing you should do if you want that is trying to understand the nature of your muscle spasms.

Basically, muscle spasms are contractions of your muscles and they can affect almost any area of your body. Since there are three main types of muscles present in the human body (the heart muscle, the skeletal muscle and the smooth muscles), each and every one of them can be affected in one way or another by these spasms.

However, the most frequent muscles affected are the skeletal ones and the spasms are usually short and painful. Under certain circumstances, this can become a recurrent condition and it can become very painful for the patient.

In general, most of the muscles spasms are caused by accidents that can happen to someone (due to improper warm up before exercising, for example) or they are caused by overusing the muscles.

However, these spasms can also be connected to deficiencies of the body, such as magnesium, calcium and even water and glucose.

In certain cases though, muscle spasms can be caused by serious diseases and medical conditions. For example, multiple sclerosis is very commonly associated with this symptom and it is a disease of the central nervous system.

Other neurologic disorders that can cause muscle spasms include muscular dystrophy, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and myopathy.

How Potassium and Muscles are connected to Each Other

The truth is that every single mineral and every single nutrient in the human body is important for its good functioning and sometimes apparently unrelated organs affect each other harshly. Hypokalemia (the potassium deficiency) is one of the things that may appear in the human body and its development may be related to surprising things.

 

Normally, potassium deficiency appears when someone’s dietary habits do not include enough products containing potassium. In certain cases though, it may be that a malfunctioning of the kidneys or that of the digestive system.

Even more, vomiting and diarrhea are known causes to reduce the potassium level in the human body and the way the adrenal glands function can influence the potassium in a person’s body as well.

One of the most poignant and frequently encountered hypokalemia symptoms is the muscle spasm or the muscle weakness. The relationship between the two of them is rather straightforward: muscles need potassium to function properly and when they don’t have enough of it, they will “act” in unusual ways.

Potassium Deficiency and the Treatment for It

Luckily, potassium deficiency is treatable in most of the cases. As long as the initial cause that led to the loss of potassium in a person’s body can be determined and cured, there is no need to worry.

In most of the cases, the doctor will recommend you with a diet that is very rich in potassium and which will help you replace the minerals you have lost.

Tomatoes and bananas are among the most well-known foods that contain huge amounts of potassium, so eating a lot of them can help you. Even more, beef and turkey are extremely frequently recommended because they contain the proteins and potassium your body will need in order to recover.

However, in certain cases diet is not enough to solve the medical issues and this is why it is highly essential that you visit the doctor as soon as you start experiencing any kind of symptoms that may be related to hypokalemia.

For example, if the cause that led to the potassium deficiency to begin with was connected to high levels of aldosterone (a hormone secreted by the adrenal gland), then the treatment you will need will be based on Spironolactone.

If the potassium deficinecy was caused by other things, then you may have to undergo injections that will help you assimilate more potassium in your body.

The best piece of advice you can get if you want to avoid muscle cramps is to eat right. Muscles are far more important than you can imagine and any kind of deficiency in your body can affect all of the muscles in it, including the heart.

Just as an example, you should know the fact that magnesium deficiency in your body can affect the heart rhythm, although this may sound rather surprising. Thus, eating right can never be too important!