Excessive sweating (hyperhidrosis) is a symptom associated with over 150 genetic disorders, including the CDK13-related genetic disorder, the CTNNB2 disorder, and the Hao-Fountain Syndrome / USP7 disorder.
Parents of special children would not be surprised to learn that excessive sweating isn't an isolated issue. It is part of a group of issues including with sweat glands, skin, teeth, hair and fingernails, and cranial and facial structures, which are all part of one group of issues called Ectodermal dysplasias.*
*While the article in the link above is informative, parents want to know what implications excessive sweating has for their child’s health and development.
One important issue is that with sweating, a person loses minerals, essential for their body’s healthy function and development. Supplementing these minerals is one step we can take to help our children counteract these negative effects.
Here is a link to an article detailing 5 important minerals that are being lost in large amounts through sweating, and what foods can help replenish them. A simple shortcut is to ensure your child has a banana a day, and some salt on their lunch or supper. That way you have added Sodium, Chloride and Potassium.
What remains is Calcium and Magnesium.
There are many issues with supplementing Calcium, and one should do it with great care. Often just the basic dietary intake is enough, and less likely than Calcium supplements to cause hypercalcemia issues with heart, kidneys and bladder.
Magnesium supplementation is however essential for most people. It will help reduce stress and muscular spasticity in children and adults, and make emptying your bowels (going to the bathroom) a lot easier. This is quite important for people with enteroception difficulties, a frequent trait of many genetic syndromes.
I have found that most supplements contain too low a dose.
This is my favourite Magnesium supplement in the UK: Viridian High Potency Magnesium. It is available from many stores. The dose is hight enough (not too high for my 9 year old) and the capsule is tiny. For those experiencing difficulties with swallowing, my other recommended Magnesium supplement is a liquid, colourless and tasteless: Ionic Minerals Magnesium Liquid Concentrate.
Last but not the least: Iron. Iron too gets lost through sweating.
Always keep an eye on the color of your child’s poo. If it looks a bit light (lighter than milk chocolate, closer to beige than to brown), this may indicate an Iron deficiency. Without Iron, oxygen isn’t properly transported to the tissues, and healthy human functioning and development aren’t possible.
Your GP will refer you for a simple blood test to test for iron deficiency.
Gentle supplementation at low doses from time to time will likely be enough to slightly darken the poo color, and will give your child’s body what Iron it needs to develop well. This is my favourite supplement in the UK market: Wild Nutrition Food-Grown Iron Plus. It is available through many websites, causes zero constipation yet is absorbed very well due to its clever formulation.
With Potassium, Sodium, Chloride, Magnesium, Calcium and Iron covered, I still do recommend a good multivitamin for any child or adult, as an "insurance policy" that every vitamin or mineral is being made available to your child's body. This low dose but full coverage multivitamin is formulated specially for children and comes in tiny capsules: Viridikid.
You may notice that my recommendations are all in glass jars with metal lids, plastic-free.
Over time, your child's sweat glands and interoception (the authonomic nervous system in charge of thermoregulation among other things) may develop so that excessive sweating subsides. Until then, frequent changing of tights or socks made of natural absorbent cotton, not synthetics, is important, - or allowing the feet to be bare and to breathe, weather permitting. Daily washing with soap will help against athlete's foot and prickly heat.
If excessive sweating does not improve, there are options available to reduce it, including deodorants, laser treatments and botox.