Hot weather opens door
for increase in heat injuries

By Reginald Rogers
Paraglide

As the number of days with 90-degree temperatures increase on Fort Bragg, so does the potential for heat injuries.

This is especially true within the Fort Bragg-Pope Air Force Base community as Soldiers and Airmen continue to train for deployment rotations.

According to officials at Womack Army Medical Center’s Preventive Medicine section, it’s not uncommon to see a rise in heat injuries between early May and late September.

Ken Ferrell, chief of the epidemiology and disease control clinic for preventive medicine, said Soldiers are susceptible to two types of heat injuries that have become common at Fort Bragg — heat exhaustion and heat stroke.

“Heat exhaustion is where they have lost fluids and their body is unable to cool them down so they get overheated,” he explained. “Heat stroke is when their body temperature has exceeded 103 degrees, they’re not cooling themselves and the person is at risk for kidney damage, brain injury and also liver failure.”

Ferrell said although heat exhaustion is the less serious of the two, it can lead to heat stroke.
“There’s a thin line between heat exhaustion and heat stroke,” Ferrell said. “The lab values don’t lie. For individuals that we recognize as heat injuries, we draw some laboratory work.”

He pointed out that anyone diagnosed with heat injuries on Fort Bragg will have lab work done to determine their kidney function, liver function and enzymes.

Ferrell said the enzymes can differentiate between heat exhaustion and heat stroke.

“A lot of times we can’t tell until we run the labs and they tell us a lot more,” Ferrell said. “It’s a very thin line. A person may not be unconscious, but may have had a heat stroke.”
He explained that some of the symptoms of heat exhaustion are nausea, headache and disorientation but not to the point of unconsciousness. Ferrell said the nausea and vomiting are key indicators of a heat injury.

Symptoms of heat stroke include dizziness and disorientation that cause fainting, He explained that if they lose consciousness for more than 15 minutes, it is considered a heat stroke.
“When we add the lab values in there as well, it becomes more conclusive,” Ferrell explained. “They’ve lost consciousness and you see that they’ve had some liver function changes and they’ve had kidney function changes, which suggest that they did have a heat stroke.”

He added that the loss of consciousness and the altered mental status are key indicators that the brain has been affected also by the heat injury. He said during heat strokes, the core body temperature can rise to about 104 degrees.

He said heat injuries at Fort Bragg are often caused by the high humidity in the late spring and summer months.

“(Heat casualties) lose their ability to cool themselves at Fort Bragg because the humidity is so high that when a person is hot, they sweat and their body is cooled by the air that blows,” Ferrell said. “But when you have up to 100 percent humidity, and they’re sweating at the same time, there’s no cool air blowing to help cool the body off.”

He said a mechanism in the body called the hypothalamus acts as the body’s heat regulator.
“It helps us because when the body gets too hot, it sends signals through chemicals that tells us the body is too hot and it needs to cool off,” Ferrell explained. “That function is lost when a person is suffering from a heat stroke. They can’t regulate their body temperature.”

(Editor’s note: This is the first part of a two-part series on heat injuries and how to prevent them.)

Share