Global warming is likely to increase the number of people requiring hospitalization due to critically low sodium levels in the blood, a condition known as hyponatremia.
Global warming is likely to increase the number of people requiring hospitalization due to critically low sodium levels in the blood, a condition known as hyponatremia. A new study from Karolinska Institutet projects that a temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius would increase the burden on hospitals from hyponatremia by almost 14 percent. The findings are published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.
“Our study is the first to provide precise estimates of how temperature influences the risk of hyponatremia, findings that could be used to inform healthcare planning for adapting to climate change,” says Buster Mannheimer, adjunct senior lecturer at the Department of Clinical Science and Education, Södersjukhuset, Karolinska Institutet and the study’s first author.
Climate change is expected to trigger a rise in average global temperatures in the coming decades, resulting in a myriad of heat-related consequences for human health. One of those is hyponatremia, which can occur from a variety of diseases such as heart, renal and liver failure as well as from excessive sweating or fluid intake that dilute the sodium concentration in the blood.
Read more at Karolinska Institutet
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