Our body has a important percentage of water It changes as we get older. The fetus has 100% water, a baby 80%, a normal adult 65% and in older people the percentage is reduced to 50%.
It is also curious to know how water is distributed in our body. It is easy to guess that 94% of blood is water but… did you know that 85% of our brain and 95% of our eyes are also water?
When, for different reasons, this distribution is altered and the liquid element accumulates in areas where it does not touch, we can be talking about fluid retention. Now in the summer it can be especially frequent as the blood vessels dilate and the blood can flow more slowly.
No. Although the terms are popularly confused, in reality it is not the same. We talk about edema when there is an accumulation of fluid in the tissues in a specific area. The tissues swell and the volume in the affected area increases. This can occur in different parts of the body such as the legs, ankles, hands, abdomen, or face. The fluid retention however is a more global term which refers to the excessive accumulation of fluid in the body in general.
On many occasions the alarm signal is given to us by the weighing machine. Unexplained weight gain occurs. There is also swelling in the legs and ankles, increased abdominal circumference and presence of pitting. What is that of the fovea? What I call “the plasticine girls”. We speak of pitting when we press the skin firmly with our finger and notice a sinking that remains for a few minutes or seconds after we have removed the finger.