What Do You Know about Dehydration?
02 August 2019
What do you know about Dehydration?
Dehydration: Do you know the signs?
Dry mouth with thick saliva, headaches, feeling sleepy or irritable, weakness, dizziness made worse when you are standing… sounds like a hangover, right? These are actually all symptoms of early to mild dehydration.
While not a hangover, this can happen from drinking alcohol as it suppresses your production of a hormone called vasopressin. This hormone would normally tell your kidneys to reabsorb water rather than passing it along to your bladder – which explains the ten trips to the bathroom on a night out – and also makes your hangover worse the next day. Below are a list of dehydration signs to look out for:
Early or mild dehydration include:
- Flushed face
- Extreme thirst or unable to drink
- Dry, warm skin
- Can’t pass urine or reduced amounts, dark yellow colour
- Dizziness, made worse when you are standing
- Feeling Weak
- Cramping in the arms and legs
- Sleepy or irritable
- Headaches
- Dry mouth with thick saliva
Moderate to severe dehydration include:
- Heart failure
- Low blood pressure
- Fainting
- Convulsions
- Sunken dry eyes
- Fast but weak pulse
- Severe muscle contractions in the arms, legs or back
- Bloated stomach
- Skin loses its firmness and looks wrinkled
- Rapid and deep breathing – faster than normal
- Lack of elasticity of the skin
Are you at risk?
While anyone can become dehydrated, there are certain groups that are particularly at risk such as infants, older people, diabetics and athletes. But what can you do to prevent dehydration? Drink plenty of fluids. Water is the best fluid to drink when dehydrated but also having a non-fizzy, low sugar sports drink will help to replace electrolytes that have been lost. These are minerals the body needs such as chloride, calcium, magnesium, sodium and potassium. Long term dehydration can have serious effects on your health.
Randox Health: What We Do
Randox Health packages go beyond a health check. We have the world’s most comprehensive full-body health programmes available on the market today, thanks to Randox Biochips which enable hundreds of individual tests to be carried out from one sample and giving you truly unrivalled knowledge about your health and wellbeing both now and in the future. Our goal is to help you extend your life. Your health matters to us and, above all, we are committed to improving healthcare worldwide by identifying and preventing illness at the earliest possible stage.
How we can help you?
Identifying the very first signs and risks of disease can help prevent health problems that may be on the horizon. Randox Health aim to do this before the appearance of unpleasant symptoms or illness. Prevention is always better than cure. Long-term mild dehydration may have caused damage to your health and our packages tests for up to 350 different biomarkers. Read about our packages here, or contact a member of our team for more information!
Want to know more?
Contact us or visit our Randox Health page to view more.