SWEAT GLANDS | What are SWEAT GLANDS? | Meaning of SWEAT GLANDS

 
Sweating is one of the natural ways, the human body maintains its normal temperature. The body has two types of sweat glands:  Apocrine which are in the armpits face scalp and parts of the trunk, Akron which are distributed throughout the body and give off a quart or more of perspiration a day. Apocrine sweat is scant milky and made up with water, carbohydrates, proteins and lipids.
 

These substances have a distinctive odor when they are broken down by the bacteria that live on the skin. In contrast the eccrine sweat is mostly water with varying amount of salt, potassium, urea and other substances. It has little or notor itself but a current swim can transmit the smells of alcohol and certain foods especially garlic and onions resulting in an unpleasant body odor. Several factors can influence sweat productions especially physical activity hot weather anxiety and emotional stress.

Sweat glands are also called sudoriferous glands and all skin surfaces except for the nipples and external genitalia contain sweat glands. In fact you get about 3 million of these per person and there are two major types of pseudo refers or sweat glands we got the eccrine or merocrine sweat glands and they're named this because they use a merocrine form of secretion and then eccrine sweat glands are also another variety, now these contain myoepithelial cells which contract on nervous system stimulation to force sweat into the ducts and onto the skin surface.

 The merocrine sweat glands also called eccrine. These are the most numerous, you find these on their palms soles your feet and forehead most abundantly. These ducts connect to pores on the surface of your skin and these are mostly involved with thermal regulation. Thermal regulation meaning that we can actually cool our body temperature down by sweating and rely on the evaporative cooling properties of water. It's actually regulated by your sympathetic nervous system which is the fight-or-flight response. So if you're excited that you're gonna sweat and this is going to help to cool your body down! 

Now the secretion of sweat is mostly water followed by salts some vitamin C, antibodies which is actually an immune element dermis sidon which is a microbe killing peptide as well as other metabolic wastes. So some wastes are also incorporated into sweat and you find that in conditions like renal failure where if your kidneys can't get rid of wastes you know your sweat glands actually end up secreting a lot of these wastes and you end up with something called uremic frost which is essentially kind of a salty coating of the skin due to an accumulation of these wastes now in sweat rather than urine.

 
So what are these eccrine sweat glands look like well essentially there's these tubular glands that are highly coiled you find them embedded within the dermis and then those drain into a duct which then winds up and then empties on the surface of your skin through a sweat pore so that sweat is essentially drained on to the surface of skin via this duct. Now remember the way that sweat actually gets up on surface of skin of those myoepithelial cells because the myoepithelial cells butts around the ducts and then essentially help to squeeze that fluid up and out of the duct towards the skin surface. This differs from the apron sweat glands. Apron sweat glands are confined to the axillary and In genital areas, when you think of an inner genital think of like perineum which is essentially the space between the external genitalia and the anus. Sweat glands secrete a more viscous milky or yellowish type of sweat that contains fatty substances and proteins.

 This is the one that's these aren't as active until puberty and their function is really unknown but they probably act as a sexual scent gland because these viscous milky substances have a lot of protein, could be pheromones that are involved with sexual communication through pheromonal communication. It turns out that the bacteria on your skin also like to break down and digest these substances in sweat and this is what leads to body odor. Body odor and the axillary which the armpit or anal genital areas, this is associated with bacteria eating apron secretions in the metabolites of those bacteria are what cause body odor now these epic respect glands are much larger than eccrine sweat glands and their ducts empty on the hair follicles rather than on the surface of skin so you only find a pair in sweat glands associated with hair, specifically the hair of your axillary and anal genital areas these aren't really involved with thermal regulation.

 They're most likely involved with sexual scent pheromonal communication. Now there are other modified sweat glands as well like cerumen, Asst glands or mammary gland. Cerumen glands are the ones that line your external ear canal. They secrete cerumen which is basically earwax and mammary glands are also a modified type of ape occurrence secretion and this is what creates breast milk. So as fascinating is that these are just similar varieties of apron glands in different areas of the body. Oil glands are the ones that are associated a hair follicle there why be distributed except for the thick skin of your palms and soles .These sebaceous or oil blends are associated with hair follicles and they're relatively inactive during puberty therefore stimulated by hormones especially androgens and the type of oil that these create is that you can't sebum. 

Sebum is this oily holocrine type of secretion. Remember the entire cell bursts to become the secretion here and it also contains bacterial seidel or bacteria killing properties and it helps to soften hair and skin so that sense that sebaceous glands help to condition your skin so you find sebaceous glands associate with hair follicles as we can see here in fact the duct of these sebaceous glands drains right onto the hair shaft or the hair root rather and that way the growing hair brings oil up to the surface of skin with it and make sure that the hair is conditioned and your skin is well conditioned.

Menopause particularly at night fever can cause heavy sweating as can AIDS Hodgkin's disease and certain other diseases to reduce unpleasant body odors from perspiration. Some studies show increasing intake of zinc and magnesium can help foods high in these important minerals include lean beef hoisters yogurt and whole grain cereals. In addition green leafy vegetables nuts and scallops are also excellent sources of magnesium also cutting down on eggs fish liver and legumes as well as avoid onion garlic and alcoholic beverages but most importantly drink plenty of water a body has between 2 and 4 million sweat glands lying deep in the skin they are connected to the surface by coiled tubes called ducts you perspire constantly even without exercise. Sweat is a liquid made from 99% water and 1% salt and fat up to a quart of sweat evaporates each day when your body becomes overheated you sweat more the evaporation of sweat from your skin cools your body down when you're frightened or nervous. Imagine being pinned under heavy weights you also sweat more your palms and forehead begin to sweat so do the soles of your feet and your armpits. These are sites where sweat glands are most abundant.

There are two types of sweat glands but only the merocrine sweat glands are known as true sweat glands. Sweat is a watery perspiration that helps cool your body and so as you know when water evaporates it has a cooling property and these merocrine sweat glands are actually the most numerous glands of the skin and so they're found on the entire surface of the human body but there are several areas where these sweat glands are highly concentrated for example the soles of the feet the palm of your hands as well as the forehead and the anatomy of merocrine sweat glands. They're just simple tubular glands and they have a coiled duct so as you can see down there. They have a coiled duct leading to a sweat pore on the surface and this duct is lined by stratified cuboidal epithelium in the dermis and then it's lined by keratinocytes in the epidermis and so now let's talk a little bit about sweat so sweat begins as a protein free filtrate of blood plasma that's produced by the secretory portion of the gland and so sweat will have potassium ions  urea lactic acid ammonia and some sodium chloride and so as a result sweat is 99% water but with all of those ions and stuff in it it'll have a pH of about 4 to 6 so it's pretty slightly acidic. 

One thing to note though is that most of the sodium chloride is reabsorbed as the secretion passes through the duct and so one thing I want to mention is that the 1% the other 1% of the total volume in sweat consists of proteins such as immunoglobin switch are proteins that function as antibodies as well as glycoproteins which are just proteins joined to carbs and the last thing that I want to mention is that sweat is hypotonic. That means it has a lower concentration of electrolytes than the cells of the sweat glands and so the main thing that I really hope you got out of this is that sweat and sweat glands are really important because they help you regulate temperature and so that's the most important thing about sweat and sweat glands.