Your body loses most of its fluids through processes like sweating and urination. When you don’t replace those fluids — by drinking water, fruit juice, or other beverages — you can become dehydrated. Dehydration prevents your body from carrying out important processes like breathing, movement and digestion.
Doctors often describe dehydration as acute or chronic, depending on how long it takes your body to lose fluids. Acute dehydration means your body is losing fluids quickly, often from exercise or sickness. Chronic dehydration occurs over a longer period and is often less noticeable. In either case, several different health issues can arise from dehydration that can affect your body both in the short and long term.
Kidney problems
Kidneys are fist-sized organs with an important role in the body: regulate fluid balances and filter out waste. The kidneys filter a half cup of blood each minute in a healthy body. They remove waste products to create urine while creating hormones that regulate blood pressure and red blood cell counts.
Dehydration adds acids and waste products to the body— waste that your kidneys must remove. This can force your kidneys into overdrive as they struggle to continually filter out unwanted chemicals. Over time, dehydration can increase your risk for kidney stones and urinary tract infections (UTIs). It can also cause kidney infections, which results in scarring that affects blood pressure.
Persistent fatigue
Most processes in the body require balanced fluids. A fluid imbalance, or an entire lack of fluids, can cause oxygen levels in your blood to drop. As a result, your heart will work even harder to distribute oxygen to different parts of the body. Insufficient oxygenation is one of several reasons why you might feel fatigued when you don’t drink enough liquid.
Dehydration can also throw off your body’s thermoregulation, or internal temperature. If your body is too hot or cold, your body will use large amounts of energy to restore appropriate temperatures. If your body is already low on fluids from exercise or outdoor temperatures, the use of energy for thermoregulation can also create fatigue.
Muscle weakness
Hydration is a central ingredient for muscle use, even if you’re not physically exercising. Dehydration can reduce blood flow and oxygen delivery to muscles — quickly limiting your mobility. A lack of fluids can also lead to electrolyte imbalances, which often have the same effect.
Frequent cramping, particularly during or after strenuous exercise, can be a strong indicator of dehydration. This occurs when plasma volumes drop without the right fluids, throwing off your electrolyte balance and leading to muscle cramping.
Dry and flaky skin
Some people who experience dehydration will also notice the onset of dry, flaky skin. During a fluid shortage, the heart sometimes pulls blood toward muscles and away from the skin. This protects vital organs but can leave skin without the moisture it needs.
In most cases, dehydration isn’t the sole contributor to skin dryness. Persistently dry or flaky skin is often the result of other factors. For example, eczema, frequent hand washing and cold weather conditions can all dry out the skin.
Frequent headaches
Chronic dehydration can also have serious consequences for the brain. Like your heart, 73% of your brain is made of water. Without constant hydration, it can experience a variety of negative health symptoms. In many cases, frequent headaches indicate that your body is low on fluids.
Blood can become thicker with dehydration. Thicker blood can’t travel as easily through blood vessels, sometimes creating a shortage of blood in the brain that causes headaches. Electrolyte imbalances, also caused by dehydration, also cause headaches and other brain-related symptoms.
Inconsistent or mild headaches can worsen with time as the body continues to lose fluids. This can eventually lead to more painful, constant headaches and symptoms like brain shrinkage.
Constipation
Hydration also affects the systems in the body that control the bowels. Your digestive system, particularly your colon, relies on fluids to operate properly. Without those fluids, waste will be much more difficult to remove from the body.
Traditionally, water lubricates the walls of your digestive tract, helping the body easily pass waste. A lack of fluids forces your colon to remove any excess water from waste, often causing painful bowel movements. Muscles in the digestive system also weaken without enough water, leading to slower evacuation times.
What causes chronic dehydration?
Chronic dehydration is sometimes the result of not drinking enough water on a consistent basis. In other cases, the cause is environmental. A wide variety of factors can contribute to a person’s chronic dehydration, including:
- Insufficient water intake: Many people develop dehydration simply because they don’t drink enough water.
- Warm, dry climates: Heat and humidity can together cause the body to sweat out more fluids than normal.
- Diabetes: Higher blood sugar levels lead to frequent urination, which means faster dehydration unless those fluids are constantly replaced.
- Kidney disease: Problems in kidney function can lead to more frequent urination or urination without fully-filtered urine. Both of these instances can create an excess of fluid loss.
- Excessive sweating: Physical activity, anxiety, heat, and other factors can cause excessive sweating that rids the body of valuable fluids.
- Digestive issues: Irritable bowel disorder (IBD) and other digestive problems can lead to chronic diarrhea, removing fluids that need to be constantly replaced.
- Medication: Laxatives and other forms of medication can dehydrate the body as a side effect during treatment.
Dehydration can occur more frequently, and more easily, in young children and babies. Young people may experience symptoms because they are not able to express themselves when they are thirsty. Their small body size or elevated metabolic rate can also cause frequent dehydration.
Treating chronic dehydration
Doctors might prescribe several forms of treatment to combat dehydration. In some cases, short-term care might be sufficient to restore full body functionality. In cases of chronic dehydration, longer-term care is often necessary to help you eliminate or control the condition and prevent further symptoms.
Short-term care
Ultimately, short-term care seeks to alleviate some of the dehydration symptoms like fatigue, dizziness, and nausea. When restoring fluids by drinking them isn’t enough, many clinicians offer IV fluid replacement. This method of therapy injects electrolytes and other valuable fluids directly into the bloodstream.
See a healthcare provider immediately if you experience symptoms of chronic dehydration. To limit symptom severity, visit an urgent care center if you cannot schedule a quick appointment with your primary care provider.
Long-term care
Prevention is the best long-term treatment for chronic dehydration. Check your urine color and eat nourishing fruits and vegetables to avoid losing excess fluids over time. Addressing chronic conditions like diabetes or kidney disease can also help you limit dehydration symptoms, even if it occurs.
Lifestyle changes can also go a long way toward preventing chronic dehydration. Avoid excess levels of alcohol and other diuretics, exercise regularly and drink enough water each day. These steps help protect against dehydration and its effects on each of your body’s systems.