This site is intended for healthcare professionals

Go to /sign-in page

You can view 5 more pages without signing in

Thermoregulatory sweating

Last reviewed dd mmm yyyy. Last edited dd mmm yyyy

Authoring team

Sweating, along with vasodilatation, is one of the body's means of reducing temperature. The signal to increase the rate of sweating arises from the hypothalamic sympathetic outflow to eccrine sweat glands.

Heat is lost from the surface of the skin as the energy used to evaporate sweat. The evaporation of one gram of water uses 2.4kJ of heat. Typically, every hour there is a basal, insensible evaporative loss of water of about 20-30 grams from both skin and lungs.

The rate of sweating is dependent upon core as well as surface body temperature. It occurs at a higher core temperature if the surface temperature is lowered, and vice versa.

The capacity of sweating to reduce temperature is dependent upon external humidity. Hence, in high humidity environments e.g. rain forest, a lower temperature is tolerated than low humidity settings e.g. desert.


Related pages

Create an account to add page annotations

Annotations allow you to add information to this page that would be handy to have on hand during a consultation. E.g. a website or number. This information will always show when you visit this page.