Because they have a painful need to do it. Often the cause is adrenal insufficiency. The adrenal glands are endocrine glands that are screwed onto the top of the kidneys. Together with the kidneys, they regulate the amount of salt and water in our body and maintain blood pressure.
The adrenal glands produce hormones like cortisol. Everyone has heard of them.
So if the adrenal glands suddenly stopped working, then a person has an irresistible need to eat salt.
Adrenal insufficiency is called Adisson's disease after the English physician Thomas Adisson, who lived in the first half of the nineteenth century and who is called the father of endocrinology.
In the days of Adisson, the adrenal glands could collapse from tuberculosis. There are now a million reasons for adrenal gland damage, but in the vast majority of cases it comes from an attack from our own immune system. And that's if we only talk about damage to the adrenal glands. In fact, the adrenal glands can stop working normally due to their inappropriate regulation by our brain.
Sometimes adrenal insufficiency occurs only from the fact that a person unnoticed for himself received a glucocorticoid hormone: smeared with some left cream for whitening the skin, or the dietary supplement was full, or he was given a blockade with a sore back with how. There are different miracles.
Our body is not a fool, and if a glucocorticoid hormone was slipped into it, then it slows down the adrenal glands for a while. And then they cannot start at the crucial moment.
It's good that this thing rarely happens. About 100 cases per million people.
Adrenal insufficiency will easily kill a person, but it is also easy to detect and easy to control.
John F. Kennedy had adrenal insufficiency. This did not stop him from raising half the globe to his ears.
Usually adrenal insufficiency lives on and gets worse until some stress or serious illness occurs. Then the so-called adrenal crisis starts. Do not confuse it with the sympatho-adrenal crisis, which is popular with us, when the pressure rises. If the adrenal glands fail, the opposite will be true.
It's like a shock. Blood pressure drops, and a lot of things in the body are disturbed. Have you heard about a round face and high blood pressure from hormones? So, with adrenal shock, everything will be the other way around. Blood pressure does not hold, salt flows out of the body, water also leaves. The anti-inflammatory effect of cortisol and similar hormones will not be, therefore, the body temperature will not jump because of what, the stomach will hurt.
Such people can easily be taken to the surgery and cut there. And given the fact that they can no longer respond to stress with their hormones, you can die from the surgery itself.
That is, during a crisis, the ability to maintain pressure, retain water or salt is lost, and the internal anti-inflammatory protection also disappears.
Remember how they say that hormones make you hungry? Here hormones will not work, and you will not want to eat at all.
If adrenal insufficiency has developed a long time ago, then there will be pigmentation in the form of dark spots on the skin.
What else happens from hormones? Blood sugar rises and diabetes is obtained. And in case of adrenal insufficiency, on the contrary, the sugar falls.
If the adrenal glands fail gradually, then such people will have weakness, nausea, vomiting, low blood pressure, pigmentation on the skin, weight loss, pain in the abdomen, muscles and joints, low blood sodium levels and unbearable urge there is salt. So they just feed on pickle from a jar of cucumbers.
