Endocrine Abstracts

Hypocalcaemia is one of the common metabolic abnormalities found in hospitalised patients. The most common cause of hypocalcaemia is Vitamin D deficiency. Others causes include hypoparathyroidism, chronic kidney disease and hypomagnesemia. Multiple factors can co-exist in the same patient. We present here a case of hypocalcaemia caused by multiple factors in the same patient. The patient we present probably had multiple factors contributing to hypocalcaemia. Our hypothesis is that a combination of proton pump inhibitor therapy plus alcoholism induced hypomagnesaemia. This caused functional hypoparathyroidism (release of PTH from the chief cells of the parathyroid glands requiring adequate serum magnesium concentrations) which, in combination with vitamin D deficiency, caused severe hypocalcaemia. Additionaly there may have been impaired of activation of vitamin D in the context of the acute kidney injury.