When your body lacks sufficient body fluids either by losing water excessively or by sweating too much or by urinating too often it leads to dehydration. If your body loses more fluids than the amount that you consume, you could be dehydrated. Dehydration can usually be remedied by drinking more fluids, preferably salt and sugar water that helps replace the lost electrolytes.
When your system has insufficient water, dehydration arises; this is usually due to an illness, not drinking enough water, or losing fluids from your body rapidly.
Diarrhea and Vomiting: Suffering from severe diarrhea could cause you to lose plenty of water and electrolytes in a reduced period of time. If you have been vomiting as well, it could lead to loss of more fluids and minerals from your system.
Excessive Sweating: Whenever you perspire, you lose water. Strenuous physical activities or severe heat and humidity could cause excessive sweating, resulting in dehydration.
Fever: When you have higher temperatures than normal, you tend to lose fluids more rapidly and get dehydrated.
Frequent Urination: This condition usually arises due to unmanageable diabetes mellitus as you tend to get thirsty more often, leading to increased urination. You could also be suffering from diabetes insipidus; in this case, your kidneys are incapable of conserving water. Taking certain medications could also cause you to sweat or urinate more frequently.
Excessive Alcohol Intake: Drinking excessive amounts of alcohol could lead to dehydration, if you do not replenish your body with water.
Here are a few symptoms that will give you a clue as to whether you are dehydrated or not.
In most cases, people do not drink the recommended 8 to 10 glasses of water a day and could get dehydrated mildly.
Dehydration and joint pain are related as when your body lacks sufficient water, it tends to affect various systems in the body, including your joints. Long-term symptoms of dehydration include headaches, exhaustion, and muscle pain. The best way to get rid of any muscle pain or any other symptom that you are suffering from is to figure out how much water is required by your body and make sure that you consume that amount daily. The body is heavily dependent on water to preserve proper bodily functions.
If you ignore symptoms of dehydration, there could be severe side effects and consequences including coma and death, heat injury, kidney failure, low blood volume shock (hypovolemic shock), seizures or swelling of the brain also known as cerebral edema.
Coma and Death: This is the most extreme and rare side effects, but if ignored, severe cases of dehydration could lead to a state of coma or even death.
Heat Injury: When you are working out and sweating profusely and if you don’t drink sufficient fluids, you could get a heat injury, which could be heat cramps, heat exhaustion, or a heat stroke.
Kidney Failure: You could face renal failure when your kidneys are not functioning properly and are unable to get rid of waste and excess fluids from your body.
Low Blood Volume Shock: This is one of the more serious side effects of dehydration and could be life threatening at times. It occurs when the blood volume in your body is reduced, leading to a dip in your blood pressure and the quantity of oxygen in your system.
Seizures: When there is an electrolyte imbalance in your body, it can cause involuntary muscle spasms and lead to blackouts.
Swelling of the Brain: When your body gets dehydrated, it tries to retain some of the water lost and could pull back excess waters into cells, which will swell and rupture. If the water cells affect the brain cells, it could be fatal.
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