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Unbearable heat, excessive sweating, sunburn, tanned skin - these are the things that come into our mind when we think of summer. The season also brings with it the risk of many diseases like jaundice, typhoid, diarrhoea, measles, heatstroke, chicken pox, dyhydration, etc.
One common condition that people suffer from in summer is dehydration, which occurs when your body loses more fluid than you take in. Therefore, you need to increase your fluid intake during summer. Dehydration can lead to serious complications, such as heat injury that may range from mild heat cramps to heat exhaustion or potentially life-threatening heatstroke. Excessive sweating during summer can lead to loss of a large amount of water from the body and cause dehydration.
Although you may think that all those ice cold soft-drinks, sodas and energy boosting shakes are good enough to quench your thirst, your body requirements of fluids actually shoot up during summers because a lot of fluids and electrolytes are lost through your body due to profuse sweating. However, your body can also get dehydrated with minimal physical activity and in the absence of sweating if you don't drink adequate amount of water. Here are some complications of dehydration you should be aware about:
1. Muscle cramps: Painful cramps are not just common in athletes, marathon runners and people who work-out a lot. If you re minimally active and drink insufficient fluids, you re also equally prone to cramps. Involuntary muscle contraction or spasms occur when the nerves that are connected to your muscles do not have sufficient water and sodium surrounding them. This causes hypersensitivity and involuntarily contraction of muscles.
2. Depression: Your brain is probably the prime organ which requires more amount of water than any other organ of your body. At any given point, the brain comprises of 20 percent of total amount of blood circulating throughout your body. And your brain cells are made up of 85 percent water. Dehydration or water deficiency in the brain cells results in immediate cut down the brain's energy supply, leading to lethargy, fatigue and depression. With suboptimal functioning of the brain cells, you ll succumb to emotional tribulations.
3. Constipation: The food you eat gets processed in the small intestine, where the non-essential part of the food is converted to waste and excreted out of the body. If you don t drink enough water, the intestinal cells start extracting water from the food waste in the intestine. As a result, the stool becomes hard and difficult to pass, resulting in constipation.
4. High blood pressure: Hypertension is common in people who are often dehydrated. When your body cells have to face lack of water, the brain signals the pituitary gland to secrete a chemical called vasopressin, a substance that causes constriction of blood vessels in parts of the system which is dehydrated. Because of constriction of blood vessels the blood pressure increases.
5. Kidney stones: Dehydration causes the urine to get concentrated. Minerals from the urine get accumulated and cause crystal formation which gets deposited in the kidneys.
6. Uremia: When you drink sufficient water, it helps the kidneys to filter the wastes easily and dilute the urine. With inadequate water, the kidneys find it difficult to separate the necessary amount of wastes from the blood. As a result, wastes that should have been excreted through urine gets trapped and keeps circulating throughout the body. This causes the waste products to get deposited in various parts of the body including joints, blood vessels, tissues and organs. The process finally ends up in extreme swelling and symptoms of uremia, due to overload of toxic byproducts.
7. Gallstone formation: Gall bladder is a small organ located just under the liver. Similar to blood vessel constriction (vasoconstriction) dehydration or water insufficiency causes constriction of bile ducts in the liver. This directly results in accumulation and concentration of bile resulting in gallstone formation.
8. Kidney disease: When your body has insufficient water, a system that holds on to water gets activated. The system instructs the kidneys to inhibit urine formation and cause tightening of capillaries in areas like the brain and heart. Increased blood pressure and retention of urine in the kidneys leads to kidney damage.
9. Joint problems: With less amount of water, your cartilage surfaces brush against each other and causes the cells to worn out and weaken over the time. Because the cells can be replaced, in healthy individuals new cartilage is normally produced to replace the damaged one. But, without sufficient water, nutrients for repair and formation of new cells are not transported efficiently. Therefore, dehydration increases the changes of delay its repair, resulting in joint problems.
10. Death: Water amounts for about 60% of your total body weight. Every process of your body needs water. Severe dehydration is therefore fatal.
Although dangerous, dehydration is probably the only condition which can be reversed immediately by re-hydration. Because your body does not have any system to store water, you should always be conscious about drinking water, especially during summers. People who have the habit of quenching their thirst with beverages like tea, coffee and alcohol, may find it difficult to drink water consciously. But here are 7 amazing tips to boost your water intake.
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