Diseases, Conditions, Syndromes

What to do when sick with norovirus or 'stomach flu'

If you went out for the evening and woke up with a sudden bad stomach, chances are you might be experiencing viral gastroenteritis. That's the broad term for an infection in the intestines. Some call it "stomach flu."

Health

Dehydration can lead to serious complications

Dehydration occurs when you use or lose more fluid than you take in, and your body doesn't have enough water and other fluids to carry out its normal functions. If you don't replace lost fluids, you will get dehydrated.

Health

Milk better than water to rehydrate kids: study

Active children need to be watered with milk. It's a more effective way of countering dehydration than a sports drink or water itself, say researchers at McMaster University.

Health

Where is the kidney stone belt?

Where you live, what you eat and how much you drink may tell health care professionals more about your risk of developing kidney stones than you think.

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Dehydration

In physiology and medicine, dehydration (hypohydration) is defined as the excessive loss of body fluid. It is literally the removal of water (Ancient Greek: ὕδωρ hýdōr) from an object; however, in physiological terms, it entails a deficiency of fluid within an organism. Dehydration of skin and mucous membranes can be called medical dryness.

There are three types of dehydration: hypotonic or hyponatremic (primarily a loss of electrolytes, sodium in particular), hypertonic or hypernatremic (primarily a loss of water), and isotonic or isonatremic (equal loss of water and electrolytes). In humans, the most commonly seen type of dehydration by far is isotonic (isonatraemic) dehydration which effectively equates with hypovolemia, but the distinction of isotonic from hypotonic or hypertonic dehydration may be important when treating people who become dehydrated. Physiologically, dehydration, despite the name, does not simply mean loss of water, as water and solutes (mainly sodium) are usually lost in roughly equal quantities to how they exist in blood plasma. In hypotonic dehydration, intravascular water shifts to the extravascular space, exaggerating intravascular volume depletion for a given amount of total body water loss. Neurological complications can occur in hypotonic and hypertonic states. The former can lead to seizures, while the latter can lead to osmotic cerebral edema upon rapid rehydration.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA