How Does Extreme Heat Affect Your Body?

Dr. Carolyn Beans talks us through it:

Are we cooked?

A couple of years ago, it was predicted that by 2050, many mid-latitude regions could experience extreme heat for 90–180 days per year, with tropical regions facing even more, making heat-related disruptions a routine part of life.

There’s a limit to how much of this we are physically able to take.

The reason is that when temperatures rise, your hypothalamus signals blood vessels near your skin to widen, increasing heat loss, while sweat glands produce sweat that cools your body through evaporation. However, sweat only cools you if it can evaporate, and high humidity reduces or even stops the required evaporation of sweat, making it harder for your body to shed heat.

Because of this, a wet-bulb temperature of about 35°C is generally considered the upper limit of human survival because sweating can no longer adequately cool the body, and continued exposure can lead to heat exhaustion and heat stroke, a medical emergency in which body temperature exceeds 40°C.

It’s also worth remembering that children, older adults, pregnant people, and those with existing health conditions face elevated risks during extreme heat, and these demographics are foremost in the numbers when heat waves increase emergency calls and hospital visits for heat illness, as well as heart, kidney, and lung conditions, amongst others (heat exhaustion can cause organ failure and death; heat stroke can cause the same plus, as the name suggests, stroke), potentially overwhelming entire healthcare systems as well as people.

To compound matters, widespread air-conditioner use (which on a global scale also contributes to this planet-warming climate change) increases electricity demand, which can overload power grids and trigger large-scale blackouts, at which point not even your desk fan can help you.

For more on all of this… Well, we usually say “enjoy”, but in this case, perhaps simply, see:

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Want to learn more?

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Take care!