Dehydration. What are they and how to avoid them
Dehydration is a more or less severe decrease in the amount of water in the body, which also affects the concentration of electrolytes. Children need special attention, the elderly and the sick.
What is dehydration?
Dehydration is the lack of water needed for the body. May be due to an excessive loss of fluids through sweat, vomiting, with diarrhea, to excessive discharge of urine (diuretic drug or untreated diabetes) or a lack of fluid intake. As a result, alter the body’s functions and there is a series of clinical signs ranging from thirst or dry skin to coma and death in extreme cases.
Normally, you lose a certain amount of water daily through breathing, sweating (half a liter a day) and urine, and tears, or feces. But it is not uncommon abnormal losses occur due to vomiting, diarrhea, fever, or dehydration from excessive heat. Excessive losses may also occur in the urine in certain diseases such as uncontrolled diabetes or intake of drugs called diuretics that promote urination. In other cases there may be loss of fluid from burns or internal or external bleeding.
Also altered the minerals: According to the waster water is not lost alone, but carries with it a number of minerals or electrolytes. In other circumstances, the lost water, there is an increased concentration of salts. This results in a series of changes called electrolyte disturbances.
Thus, besides water, electrolytes are lost in the following circumstances:
- Diarrhea is lost in baking.
- With severe diarrhea, vomiting and lost potassium.
- With diuretics, especially thiazide-called, and the drugs used in psychiatric treatment or nicotine, sodium is lost.
- With an excessive loss of urine is lost potassium.
Other times there is an increase in the concentration of salts:
- With the vomiting and diuretics increases plasma bicarbonate.
- There hypernatremia (high sodium) by copious sweat in humid or hot, gastrointestinal losses especially in childhood diarrhea, loss of water through the skin and breathing, especially in fevers, excessive urinary loss of central diabetes insipidus nephrogenic diabetes insipidus.
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