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Health Female Adda
1 year ago
Excessive Sweat: How to Stop Sweating
Although it's one of the things your body does to help you, most of us would rather leave the sweating to the poolside glass of iced tea. That's because excessive sweating is a lot like tequila or reality TV — tolerable in small doses, unbearable when you're exposed to too much of it. This perspiration primer will help you figure out how you can handle, stop, and embrace your own sweaty situations.

Sweat Shop: What Is It?

When your body heats up — from weather, exercise, stress, lingering kisses on your neck — your brain sends the message that your system is overheating. The message travels to nerves that lead to the more than 2 million sweat glands that lie under your skin. And that's when they send moisture through the sweat ducts to your skin's surface. The evaporation from your skin is what cools the body.

"Your hypothalamus is a thermostat: If the body's core temperature goes up, it sends out a message for sweating to start," says Lawrence Gibson, M.D., a dermatologist at the Mayo Clinic. "When the temperature goes down, it shuts the sweat off again."

Consisting of water, salt, and electrolytes, most sweat doesn't smell. What does smell is the mixture of sweat with other bodily substances. Your body has two kinds of sweat glands — eccrine, which regulate body temperature, and apocrine, which release pheromones. The apocrine glands, which are found in the underarms and groin and develop during adolescence, secrete a viscous mixture that also contains proteins and fats. Body odor starts when that sweat mixes with bacteria on your skin.

Besides the cooling function, sweat also serves an important purpose for signaling healthy and normal bodily function. "If you're in the middle of an intense activity and stop sweating, it's a sign of dehydration," Dr. Gibson says. Sweating gives us a gauge to when we might be overheating or need to replenish liquids, he adds, thus helping to keep the body's water level on target.

Sweating has other benefits. Christine Raffa, owner of Raffa Power Yoga in Rhode Island, compares power yoga-style sweating to the Native American sweat lodge, which was used for physical and spiritual purification. Sweating cleans the skin while releasing toxins and bringing moisture back into the body, she says.

Although it's one thing to sweat while you're running, doing yoga, or having sex, it's quite another to do it all over your boss' M&Ms jar. That's why most of us use a deodorant (to mask smell), an antiperspirant (to slow the flow of sweat), or a combination of both.

Some women, after hearing rumors that ingredients in antiperspirants cause cancer, use other tactics like applying rubbing alcohol, blow-drying underarms after showering — not so nutty, since bacteria is the cause of BO — or using products made from natural ingredients.

"There's nothing at this time telling us [antiperspirant use] is dangerous," says Marisa Weiss, M.D., oncologist and president of breastcancer.org. Most antiperspirant isn't absorbed, she says, and any trace amount that might be would not likely make it to the lymph nodes near the underarm. Even if it did, lymphatic drainage flows to the rest of the body, not toward the breast, Dr. Weiss says.

Sweat Stop: What to Do

Raffa says she has found that the purer the body gets — from improving such regimens as diet and exercise — the less she needs to mask smell. "I don't really need deodorant for day-to-day," she says. If you're looking for more ways to downgrade your tropical storm to a light drizzle, try these other remedies:

Use dress shields. Place a stick-on dress shield in the underarm of a dress or blouse to avoid the telltale dark circles (available at dressshields.com).

Watch your diet. Have a big interview coming up? Skip the chicken vindaloo the night before. Garlic, onions, and curry all can come out through sweat, says Dee Anna Glaser, M.D., associate professor of dermatology at Saint Louis University. "We're a hyperclean society — people take two and three showers a day, but still eat fast food and drink Diet Cokes," Raffa says, and that affects the odor that comes out during a heavy sweating session.

Downsize your vices. Carrying extra weight, smoking, and drinking alcohol or caffeine can all increase sweat as well, according to mayoclinic.com.

Extreme Sweating: The Signs and Solutions

If your sweat glands work more like a car wash than a slowly dripping faucet, it can be a sign of something more serious. Diabetes, thyroid problems, and heart and lung disease all can lead to excessive sweating. But it could also be a sign of hyperhidrosis, a central nervous system dysfunction that causes continual excessive sweating for no obvious reason — usually in the underarms, palms, or feet.

About 4 million women suffer from the condition, according to a recent study in Dermatology Journal. (And we do mean suffer. Dr. Glaser recalls one patient who had a tailor put terry cloth pockets in all her pants and skirts so she could dry her palms before shaking hands.)

Treatments include prescription antiperspirants like Drysol, which use high amounts of aluminum chloride to clog sweat glands but also can cause skin irritation. Surgery has also been used to clamp or cut the nerves leading to sweat glands, but the most promising treatment is Botox. Known for plumping out wrinkles, Botox was approved by the FDA in July for treating underarm hyperhidrosis. "The results are great, and the safety profile is really good — no systemic side effects," Dr. Glaser says.

The procedure takes about 10 minutes. Each armpit gets 10 to 20 shots of Botox — 50 milligrams in each pit (topical anesthesia is optional). Patients see a significant reduction of sweat (though not 100 percent) in 2 to 3 days, says Dr. Glaser. Treatments run from $400 to $1,000 per underarm and have to be repeated about every 6 to 12 months (though insurance typically covers it for hyperhidrosis sufferers).

"I think a lot of people out there are suffering with hyperhidrosis and don't realize there's a treatment that can take care of it," says Joel Spitz, M.D., a New York dermatologist. "These people are hugging me the next time they see me. They become normal human beings again."
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