Doctor led hyperhidrosis treatments last for many months, but it eventually gets reabsorbed into your body and the effect disappears, usually six-monthly. This hyperhidrosis treatment may be suggested when other treatments have not produced results since the process itself can be quite uncomfortable, particularly when we’re talking about the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet.
We can target your underarm sweat glands and groin sweat glands with a series of injections for temporary relief from excess sweating. Neuromodulator injections for sweating usually only work well on small areas because we can’t relax too many muscles or nerves, or it could disrupt other functions of your skin and body, which we don’t want.
How do sweat glands work?
You have two types of sweat glands – eccrine sweat glands and apocrine sweat glands – with both a tiny tubular structure in the skin known as an exocrine gland – it squirts stuff out onto your skin as opposed to into the blood (which endocrine glands do).
Eccrine sweat glands
Eccrine sweat glands are controlled by the sympathetic nervous system and regulate your body temperature. You get hot, and the eccrine glands get mostly water onto the skin’s surface so that evaporation provides cooling.
If you remember science class, and that energy never disappears but only changes form, then you can understand how evaporation works to cool you – heat is transferred from your body into the water, which then passes into the air – out of your body. Additionally, our skin feels cooler when the breeze hits moist skin if the air outside of your body is not already quite water-laden (humid). A fan causes the water on our skin to evaporate faster, taking the heat with it – cool, huh!
Only mammals have eccrine glands, but not all animals have them all over our bodies like humans. In fact, only a few do – for example, horses and bears – while some other animals like cows, donkeys, dogs, cats and sheep only have sweat glands in their paws or lips. This is why dogs pant to cool down – same process, but using moisture in the breath. Smaller animals are not able to lose that much water so do not sweat at all.
Apocrine sweat glands
Your apocrine sweat glands are associated (generally) with hair follicles, and continuously secrete sweat that contains fatty molecules into the glands. These glands are mostly concentrated around the groin, anal area and armpits, and are not used for cooling, but as a type of chemical messenger. Ever heard about ‘the smell of fear’? It’s a real thing, and your apocrine glands are responsible.
These glands work all the time, but they really ramp up their action when you feel stressed emotionally. The tubule wall contracts, expelling this fatty sweat onto the skin. Bacteria break this sweat down into smaller, odour-laden fatty acids. These specific glands are not active in children; only after puberty does the ‘on’ signal for apocrine glands appear, indicating their usefulness in our adults lives, unbeknownst to us. (Our sense of smell goes way beyond what we think we can smell – our noses are molecule detectives.)
Who gets the best results from hyperhidrosis treatments?
The number of sweat glands in each of us varies hugely, but the areas in which sweat glands are placed are always the same. Sweat glands may exist, but not be active.
The palms are estimated to have about 370 sweat glands per square centimetre, so the average hand could possibly have thousands and thousands of sweat glands on the palm alone. The back of the hand by contrast has about 200 per cm2 , the forehead about 175 per cm2 , the breast, belly and forearm, about 155 per cm2 . The back of the legs, however, are thought to only have between 60 and 80 sweat glands per cm2 .
On your finger pads, the sweat glands are irregularly set, and because the skin on the feet and hands is so thick, the way sweat glands are interlaced into the epidermis is somewhat different to the rest of the body. This is why our hands and feet feel different than other parts of our body when we sweat.
Things that make us sweat – hyperhidrosis triggers
There are a few things that cause human beings to get sweaty.
- Being hot (thermal triggers; thermoregulation) – controlled by the hypothalamus
- Getting emotional (emotional triggers – fear; anxiety; pain; stress)
- Food (chilli, capsaicin – binds to heat receptors in the mouth; heated food; increased metabolism caused by digestion)
Bit sweaty?
Try our excessive sweating treatment in Melbourne.
Contact us
*Results may vary from person to person
