Summer is a season for outdoor activity, including various leisure activities. People pay little attention to health issues except for troubles in the digestive system, such as food poisoning, during the season.

If you also think so, you may be wrong. In summer you'd better greater attention to health issues besides food poisoning – one of them is dizziness.

In summer, many people complain about dizziness because the season provides various reasons for causing dizziness, such as dehydration, air-conditioningitis resulting from overcooling, heat and outdoor activities.

Most common is the cooling disorder, resulting from abrupt and repeated exposure to different temperatures, which causes abnormality in the automatic control system. This weakens body temperature-controlling ability, throws the body off balance, and result in dizziness. Also, people can be affected by heat stroke by exposing themselves to heat for a long time by engaging in outdoor activities.

As people feel dizzy too frequently in summer, they tend to overlook even the kind of dizziness that can threaten their life. A case in point is cerebral apoplexy, more commonly known as stroke.

Many seem to think stroke mainly occurs in winter, but that’s not necessarily the case. According to statistics at the Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service in 2013, the number of stroke patients was highest in July.

The three primary culprits behind the strokes in summer are sweat, air conditioner and stress. Dehydration leads to sticky blood, and lowers automatic regulatory function, resulting in a drop in cerebral blood flow, which in turn causes dizziness, fainting and mental deterioration, according to the Seran General Hospital.

Also, the wide gap of temperature between indoor and outdoor space often causes blood pressure to rise and constricts blood vessels.

“We often comprehensively use the term dizziness, but when we enter into details, people experience different symptoms of dizziness depending on their causes,” said Park Ji-hyon, head of the diagnosis division at the hospital’s neurological department. “In summer, various types of dizziness can occur because of the season’s living environment, and it is essential to know about what kind of dizziness one is experiencing.”

If the dizziness does not come temporarily and disappears soon but repeatedly occurs and continues for long, people should visit hospitals and get a precision diagnosis, Park noted.

“If you make light of dizziness and do nothing about it, the symptom can develop into chronic dizziness,” the physician added.

Copyright © KBR Unauthorized reproduction, redistribution prohibited