CONDITIONS TREATED

Excessive Sweating and Facial Blushing

What is Excessive Sweating?

Sweating is the natural process that regulates your body's temperature. Over activity of the 2-4 million sweat glands you are born with (women have more than men but male sweat glands are more active) can be embarrassing but may also indicate other problems. Excessive sweating of the hands, feet and armpits is called primary hyperhidrosis and no cause can be found. It tends to run in families. Excessive sweating resulting from another medical condition is called secondary hyperhidrosis.

What symptoms may I have?

If sweating is accompanied by fever, weight loss, chest pain, shortness of breath, or a rapid, pounding heartbeat, talk to your doctor as these symptoms may indicate an underlying problem, such as hyperthyroidism. Your thyroid may be over-producing hormones, which affect many of your body's functions, not just sweating.

Excessive sweating may also be a symptom of menopause, accompanied by hot flushes and night sweating. Secondary hyperhidrosis is also symptomatic of a number of other medical conditions, so you should seek medical advice if you are affected.

Diagnosis

Your doctor will ask you about location and timing of your sweating as well as what triggers it. Also it's important to understand what other symptoms are present, such as cold, clammy hands, or fever, raised heartbeat or lack of appetite. Although often a neurological problem, sweating can also result from systemic and metabolic conditions.

Treatment/Surgical Intervention

If excessive sweating is identified as primary hyperhidrosis - with no other serious cause - there are treatments that can reduce the embarrassment of, for example, underarm sweating. Thoracoscopic sympathectomy is a keyhole technique to surgically interrupt the sympathetic nerves responsible for sweating. As with any surgery, however, it is not without risks and excessive sweating may subsequently occur in other parts of the body. Botox can also be used to provide a temporary block on the underarm sweat glands.

What is Facial Blushing?

Facial blushing is the redness which develops in the face as a result of emotion, embarrassment, heat or sometimes spicy foods and excessive drink in some races. It results from dilation of the tiny capillaries in the face allowing blood to flow to the surface. Although a normal response, this can be excessive in some people and the situation exacerbated by their awareness of it. In some people the same nerves responsible for hyperhidrosis also lead to excessive blushing. The two conditions may also exist together. The stimulus is usually emotional and therapy may often help, but in severe cases, thoracoscopic sympathectomy can abolish the blushing response.

Diagnosis and treatment

If you do have rosacea, topical application of medication or taking an oral antibiotic can usually suppress the symptoms but it would not cure the problem completely.

Although rosacea tends to recur after 5-10 years, it then usually disappears all by itself. If your facial flushing is not diagnosed as rosacea, then it may respond to medications such as beta-blockers, and sometimes psychotherapy can help you overcome any anxieties that lead to emotional causes of blushing.

Laser treatment of thread veins may reduce your flushed appearance but their underlying cause may be the rosacea. Surgery to the nerves responsible for opening the facial blood vessels may also be considered.