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Damn, Summer: How the Human Body Cooks to Death

You might've even had a small taste of heat stroke in your life, in the form of heat exhaustion, which severity-wise falls somewhere between heat cramps and full-on stroke. Exhaustion is the span between when the body's normal cooling mechanisms stop keeping up and the 105°F body temperature lower-limit for stroke. It's more of an early warning sign than a syndrome in itself. Symptoms include (but are not limited to) a rapid pulse, pouring sweat, nausea, and the first inching upward of the body's internal temperature from normal. If action isn't taken immediately (and even if it is, in some cases), the result is pretty much guaranteed: stroke. Heat stroke is much more clearly defined than…

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  Dizziness, headache, dry skin … how to spot heatstroke – and avoid it in the first place

Are you just wilting a little, suffering from heat exhaustion or risking death from full-blown heatstroke? Here’s how to tell the difference and protect yourself, your friends and family – and your pets.

 How to Avoid Heatstroke

Heat illness itself is an omnibus term, covering “a spectrum of seven or eight different conditions,” that range from mild heat exhaustion to life-threatening heat stroke...

 It’s Not the Heat. It’s the Humidity.

As climate change progresses, it’s not just warmth that will hurt us. It’s the humid heat.

 Know the difference between heat stroke and heat exhaustion. One can kill you quickly

Heat stroke, on the other hand, can be life-threatening and is frequently related to overexertion (though it can also affect young children, older adults, and other people whose bodies regulate temperature inefficiently in chronically hot environments).

 To Keep Clear of Heatstroke, Pay Attention to This Metric

As the wet-bulb temperature climbs, the body loses its ability to cool itself with sweat.

Articles of Interest

Explainer: what is heat stroke?

People with heat stroke become confused, irritable, hallucinate and can even go into a coma. They may have difficulty walking, muscle tremors, a pulse greater than 130 beats per minute, and breathe faster than normal. The body’s temperature can rise to greater than 40C. This constellation of symptoms can look like someone has taken a toxic ingestion of cocaine or is having a reaction to a drug like aspirin, a serious infection or alcohol withdrawal.

Heat stroke is a danger, but cardiovascular stress causes more heat wave deaths

While the sharp rise in mortality rate during a heat wave is apparent, the cause of those deaths may not always be. Heat stroke is not the only issue. The biggest factor is the stress that extreme heat places on the cardiovascular system (the heart and blood vessels).

Heat stroke: A doctor offers tips to stay safe as temperatures soar

Heat stroke is when a person’s core body temperature rises too high (often more than 104 F) because high environmental temperature (typically over 90 F) and humidity (over 70% relative humidity) prevents the body from cooling through its normal means of sweating and breathing. As heat stroke develops, our heart beats fast, our lungs breathe fast, we feel dizzy and nauseated, our muscles cramp, and we become confused, eventually losing consciousness entirely.

How Extreme Heat Kills, Sickens, Strains and Ages Us

Researchers are drilling down into the ways life on a hotter planet will tax our bodies, and looking for protections that, unlike air-conditioning, don’t make the problem worse.

It takes just six minutes for a dog to die in a hot car

When a dog starts to overheat, it will lose heat by increasing its heart rate and opening up the capillaries in the skin. It will also pant to lose heat through the mucus membranes in its mouth and nose, and may lick its body to cool it by evaporation. Unlike humans, dogs cannot sweat. And as the heat increases, bodily functions start to break down.

This Is What Heat Stroke Does To Your Body

Heat stroke is an extreme elevation of your body temperature that occurs when your body stops being able to regulate itself, according to Dr. James Wantuck, a doctor at PlushCare, an online urgent care provider. “If a fever is like an infection turning up your body’s thermostat, heat stroke is like a broken air conditioner,” he says.

What Are the Signs of Heat Stroke?

For most people, the symptoms of heat stroke, even when it's acute, are reversible, Dr. Becker says. Studies have shown that long-term effects from heat exhaustion or stroke are rare, he adds. "Organs do have some resiliency," says Dr. Becker. "But take precautions: Take breaks, have access to a cold pool and if you feel ill, stop what you're doing and get to a cool place."

What are the signs of heat stroke?

Making matters more confusing, a compromised ability to make rational decisions can also be a symptom of heat stroke, so be aware that people with heat-related illnesses may deny feeling ill.

When Heat Stroke Strikes, Cool First, Transport Later

And though the guidelines were written with athletes in mind, they can be applied by anyone who hopes to stay active during the summer months, the athletic trainers say. "The biggest change is the concept of cool first, transport second," says Douglas Casa of the University of Connecticut's Korey Stringer Institute.

Why Extreme Heat Is So Bad for the Human Body

While everyone is susceptible to the health effects of heat, some people are at much greater risk than others. Infants and children are particularly vulnerable, in part because they lose fluid more quickly than adults and have to rely on caretakers to help cool them down...

Resources

3 tips for preventing heat stroke

Fans help – not by lowering the air temperature but by causing air movement over the skin, resulting in evaporation of sweat, which lowers the body temperature. Even though fans are useful, air conditioning is better in high humidity because it produces drier air that allows your body to cool itself more readily.