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Hello my name’s Adrian Richards, I'm the Director of Aurora Skin Clinics and today
I'm going to be talking about Hyperhidrosis which is also know as excessive sweating.
So excessive sweating can occur to normal individuals obviously in hot weather or in
nervous situations, but Hyperhidrosis is a condition which is characterised by really
excessive sweating over and above what is normal and the places you typically get it
are the armpits or under arm area, the feet and the soles of the hands. You can get it
in other areas such as the small of the back and the face, particularly the hairline of
the scalp, but the most common area is really the axilla or underarm area.
Now, why do we sweat? Basically there are two types of sweat glands, eccrine sweat glands
and Apocrine sweat glands. Eccrine sweat glands produce a thin watery sweat. Apocrine sweat
glands produce more thick viscous smelly oily sweat. So the sweat glands we’re talking
about involving Hyperhidrosis are the eccrine sweat glands which produce the watery non-smelly
sweat. So people with Hyperhidrosis have an abnormal innovation to these sweat glands,
so in heat, nervous situations, or just for no reason, these sweat glands are turned on.
And why are they turned on? I often tell my patients that it's really sort of faulty wiring
that the nerve impulses which normally switch the sweat glands on when it's hot when you
need to lose weight, heat by evaporation are switched on when they shouldn’t be and this
really causes excess sweating which can be really very severe. So Hyperhidrosis the severity
is classified into four main groups ranging from group 1 which is ‘I rarely sweat and
never have a problem with it’, to 4 which is ‘I have a lot of excess sweating and
it bothers me on a daily basis’. So, excess sweating normally comes on in teenage
years, uncontrollable sweating and makes it very difficult in social situations and often
our patients find it very difficult to wear any clothes other than dark clothes, they
wear baggy clothes and they find it very difficult to wear sort of light coloured clothes. So
Hyperhidrosis is really quite debilitating for a number of people and the really severe
Hyperhidrosis will affect 3% to 4% of the population but a greater number are affected
with slightly more moderate sweating, and in later videos I'm going to be talking about
treatment options for Hyperhidrosis and I hope you’ll find what I've said interesting
and useful and I would encourage you to view the further videos to get more insight into
how the problem can be treated. Thank you.