Dehydration - Causes, Symptoms and Treatment

Dehydration occurs when the normal water content of your body is reduced. This leads to a change in the vital balance of chemical substances in your body, especially sodium (salt) and potassium. In order to function properly, many of the body's cells depend on these substances being maintained at the correct levels.

How Dehydration Affects You and Your Child:

How it affects you:   Being well-hydrated is important to your physical and mental health. Dehydration makes a person tired, cranky, and stiff-jointed. Being dehydrated can bring on headaches, nausea, aches and cramps -- and other, more serious physical ailments. Dehydration can make it more difficult for parents to be patient with children and with each other. Severe dehydration can cause seizures, coma, or even death.

Causes of Dehydration

Contamination is one of the causes of dehydration because our bodies have to eliminate toxins normally thru urine. More toxins = more elimination = more dehydration

Some athletes, such as wrestlers who need to reach a certain weight to compete, dehydrate themselves on purpose to drop weight quickly before a big game or event by sweating in saunas or using laxatives or diuretics, which make a person go to the bathroom more. This practice usually hurts more than it helps, though. Athletes who do this feel weaker, which affects performance. They can also have more serious problems, like abnormalities in the salt and potassium levels in the body. Such changes can also lead to problems with the heart's rhythm.

Symptoms of dehydration?

Extreme thirst, more than normal or unable to drink

Cannot pass urine or reduced amounts, dark, yellow

Decreased urine output to try to conserve water. The urine will become concentrated and more yellow in color.

Thirst to increase water intake along with

Preventing Dehydration

Water is one of the most important nutrients in our body. It makes up approximately 70 percent of our muscles, and about 75 percent of our brains. We use water as well as expend it. In fact just in everyday breathing we lose about two cups of water. Other ways that we lose body water is through sweating and urinating. If we fail to replenish these losses, we set ourselves up to become dehydrated.

Treatment for Dehydration

When a person becomes dehydrated they have also lost electrolytes so it is very important to replenish them along the water. The type of electrolytes needed for rehydration are sodium and potassium salts usually found in sports drinks like Gatorade and pediatric formulas like Pedialite. Electrolytes are needed for electro-chemical reactions within cells. A lack of electrolytes in the body can interfere with the chemical reactions needed for healthy cell operation and is known as water intoxication. This can become a serious condition and has lead to death in extreme cases.

Electrolyte solutions or freezer pops are especially effective. These are available at pharmacies. Sport drinks contain a lot of sugar and can cause or worsen diarrhea. In infants and children, avoid using water as the primary replacement fluid.

Drink a rehydration drink, water, juice, or sports drink to replace fluids and minerals. Drink 2qt of cool liquids over the next 2 to 4 hours. You should drink at least 10 glasses of liquid a day to replace lost fluids. You can make an inexpensive rehydration drink at home. But do not give this homemade drink to children younger than 12. Measure all ingredients precisely. Small variations can make the drink less effective or even harmful.