Heat Stroke

When psychological and physiologic adaptation mechanisms become dysfunction to environment induced a period of elevated heat stress, heat-related emergencies occur. Heat-related illness may be trivial to life threatening. They represent a continuum of disorders such as heat edema, prickly heat, heat cramps, heat tetany, heat syncope, and heat exhaustion to critical disease well known as heat stroke. It can be easily found in higher temperature situation such as the hot summer in Taiwan or those who have chronic medical diseases, older than 75 years, younger than 4 years, mental illness, alcoholics, and vigorous exertion without proper training and acclimatization. Due to the high mortality is from 10 to 75 % in heat stroke, delay treatment after 2 hours onset of severe symptoms may result in poor outcome. Early recognition and prevention become more important as early actually treatment. For the above reasons, the articles about heat stroke were reviewed to help emergency physicians to be familiar with the heat related illnesses and cooling techniques and provide optimal management for such victims.(Ann Disaster Med. 2004;2 Suppl 2:S97-S109)