Problems Related To Sweating

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To absorb what happens, here presented the analogy of your car. When your car's cooling system is running efficiently, excess heat from the engine is conveyed to the water in the tubes, which goes to the radiator to be cooled by the air. The cooled water goes assist to heats once again by heat drawn from the engine. If there is not sufficient water in the system to allow for proper heat dissipation, your engine over heats, your car stops running and you are left troubling at the side of the road. Now image your body as the car - your muscles are the engine, your skin is the radiator and your blood vessels are the water tubes that connect engine with the radiator.

When your cooling system is running smoothly, excess heat from your muscles is drawn in to your blood vessels where is travels to your skin and evaporating sweat draws heat away from the blood vessels. The cooler blood then recirculates throughout the body, reducing body temperature. When too much water is lost through sweating, your blood volume drops. This reduces blood pressure which in future reduces blood flow between the muscles and skin. To overwhelm this, your heart rate increases. Because less blood reaches the skin, heat loss is reduced and the body over heats. If you fail to replace the water you lose, you run the risk of becoming dehydrated. Once a person is dehydrated, more than 4% or 5% of his body weight, his exercise functioning declines by 20% to 30%. Not only that, the effect of dehydration on the cardiovascular system can create heart problems in people with coronary heart disease and diabetes.

Sweating is not the only way you drain water. One more is through respiration - you lose water every time you exhale. This water loss rises as your physical activity upturns because you breathe more. So if you are just substituting how much you are sweating out, it is not enough. If you just drink when you are thirsty, you are not getting adequate water because thirst alone is not the best measures of a body's fluid needs. Commonly speaking, you should drink water before, during and after exercise. Drinking about two cups (160z) of water one hour earlier and one cup half an hour before is a good start. Then you should drink half a cup to one cup or more, each 15 - 20 min. The amount differs on the air temperature, your body weight and how hard you are exercising.

Two distinctive sets of nerves supply these many glands: the 'sympathetic' nerves, which cultivate to increase sweating when one is excited, nervous, or afraid (the "fight or flight response"), and the other one is 'parasympathetic' nerves, which tend to decrease sweating of the skin. At the ends of these nerves, the body releases special chemicals called 'Neurotransmitters', which transmit the electrical signal from the nerves onto the cells near the nerve endings.

For the sweat glands, the chemical at the pointers of the sympathetic nerves is 'acetylcholine'; too much of this chemical present next to the sweat glands motivates them to produce large amounts of fluid. Many doctors feel that one of the biggest problems in people with idiopathic hyperhidrosis (excessive sweating due to unknown cause) is the reality that the sympathetic nerves are over stimulated, making the neurotransmitters "go erratic " at the nerve endings. Several activities that stimulate the nervous system, such as strong smells, spicy foods, intensified air temperatures, exercise, high emotional excitement, stress or nervousness may produce attacks of excessive sweating through sympathetic nerve over activity.

Some areas of the skin have numerous sweat glands, while other areas have comparatively few; they are present in the highest intensity in the palms of the hands and soles of the feet. In addition to sweat glands, skin also has oil glands that surround almost every hair root (the Sebaceous glands).

Ultimately, in some areas such as the underarm and the groin, there is found a special sweat gland called the 'Apocrine gland', which discharges a very thick type of sweat that has a large amount of fatty chemicals in it. These chemicals can be broken down by bacteria on the exterior of the skin to produce the smelly chemicals that are mostly guilty for 'Body Odor'.

Photo Source: Flickr under creative commons lisence.

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Electric currents through the skin - called iontophoresis - may disturb the function of the sweat glands, stopping them from working for a long time. With the use of a home operated device, a small electric current is sent through the skin from one area to another. The electric current " stun " the sweat glands, and they stop making sweat until they recover. With using this machine a few times per week, dryness in the area of treatment can be gained that can last for weeks. This may work well if only a few small areas of skin have the excessive sweating problem, but requires regular treatments.

The nervous supply to the sweat glands can be disturbed by cutting or destroying the sympathetic nerves. Since these nerves are very small, they are usually reached at areas near the spinal cord, where many nerves run together into structures known as sympathetic 'ganglia', before they spread out all over the body. This creates one of the most efficient treatments against sweating - thoracic nerve snipping surgery, which has everlasting effect.

Once the nerves are cut or destroyed, the sweat glands that are supplied by those nerves stop discharging sweat; in addition, other parts of the skin also lose their sympathetic nerve supply, so the skin may lose its capability to control its temperature and blood flow. This may lead to paleness and coldness of the skin where its nerve supply has been interrupted. People who undergo from blushing may find this side-effect desirable, as they will lose the ability to blush in those areas involved by the surgery.

Drug may be taken internally that works to block the neurotransmitter, acetylcholine, from motivating the sweat glands. Some of the more useful medicines include the anticholinergics, some antihistamines, some antidepressants, and some of the tranquilizers. But, these medicines will also disturb other parts of the body, and may have side-effects, including dry mouth, drying of other secretions or the constipation.

One new approach that may work on small areas of skin that have excessive sweating is to inject 'botulinum toxin' into small areas of the skin (such as the underarms), which blocks the acetylcholine for up to 12 months before it wears off.

Boil five tea bags in a quart of water for nearly five minutes. After the solution cools, soak your hands or feet for 25 to 30 minutes nightly. Tea has tannic acid, which is also found in commercial products such as Zilactol, and Zilactin. The harsh properties of tannic acid are thought to be partly responsible for its antiperspirant action.

It is really important to obtain a correct diagnosis before trying to find a cure. Many diseases and conditions share mutual symptoms: if you treat yourself for the wrong illness or a specific symptom of a complicated disease, you may delay appropriate treatment of a serious underlying problem. In other words, the extreme danger in self-treatment may be self-diagnosis. The 'Apocrine glands' can rarely get diseased or infected, and may lead to a condition known as 'hidradenitis suppurativa', which is a grave medical condition that may require antibiotics or surgery to cure the disorder. If you do not know what you really have, you can't treat it! Better consult your Doctor.