Question

A person working in hot environment who consumes more water without salt is likely to develop a condition called

• A. Heat stroke
• B. Heat exhaustion
• C. Heat cramps
• D. Heat hyperpyrexia

Hint:

Losing salt in sweat but replacing only water leads to painful muscle spasms, not high fever or collapse.

Answer 1

The Correct Option is C

Step 1: Track what happens to salt during heavy sweating.
A person working hard in a hot environment loses large amounts of both water and salt through sweat. If this person then drinks plain water to quench thirst but does not replace the lost salt, the body's salt level keeps falling even as fluid volume is topped up.

Step 2: Connect low salt to muscle symptoms.
Salt, mainly sodium, is needed for normal muscle and nerve function. When sodium in the body drops relative to water, the muscles that have been working hardest, usually in the limbs and abdomen, go into painful, involuntary spasms called heat cramps. This condition is also known by older names like stoker's cramps or miner's cramps, reflecting the workers first described with it.

Step 3: Rule out heat stroke.
Heat stroke is a medical emergency caused by a failure of the body's temperature control, leading to a very high core temperature along with confusion or loss of consciousness. This picture centers on brain and body temperature failure, not on painful muscle spasms from salt loss, so it does not match the description.

Step 4: Rule out heat exhaustion.
Heat exhaustion happens from combined heavy fluid and salt loss and shows up as weakness, dizziness, headache, and fainting, but body temperature is usually normal or only mildly raised, and cramps are not the leading feature. The specific detail of drinking water without salt points more precisely to cramps than to this broader, milder illness.

Step 5: Rule out heat hyperpyrexia.
Heat hyperpyrexia is essentially another name for a very severe rise in body temperature, overlapping with heat stroke, and again does not describe painful muscle cramps from salt depletion.

Step 6: Final answer.
Replacing sweat losses with plain water and no salt classically produces heat cramps. \[ \boxed{\text{Heat cramps}} \]