I\'ve wondered about this for a long time, and hopefully someone here has a reas

Question

I've wondered about this for a long time, and hopefully someone here has a reasonable answer. I'm a cell and molecular biologist, and much of my time at the bench is spent wearing (usually nitrile) gloves. I've noticed that if I wear them for longer than 10 or 15 minutes they start accumulating sweat. However, my hands aren't clammy or damp when I'm not wearing gloves, so my question is whether my hands are always sweating at approximately the same rate, and the impermeable barrier of the gloves just traps the moisture, or does the enclosed environment inside the gloves promote sweating? My hands don't seem particularly hot when I have the gloves on, and the gloves themselves are pretty thin, although they do have some insulating properties, as I can handle items taken from a -80

Explanation / Answer

Hand sweating has been fairly well-studied, both because sweating from the hands is one of the main mechanisms of heat dissipation at higher temperatures and because there is a significant effect on palmar sweating by the autonomic nervous system (the main cause of hyperhydrosis of the palms).

Disregarding autonomic effects (stress response), the single most important determinant of hand and foot blood flow is the thermal status of the body core. Heat dissipation is more marked in the hands than feet, and remains so as temperature increases.

Studies have been done of palmar sweating in extremes of temperatures, palmar sweating changes with aging (decreases), palmar sweating in disease, etc. But what has not been studied is the effect of localized heat on sweating of the palms, which would be of interest to you if sweating was a result of the insulating capacity of the gloves.

What is known about palmar sweating is that it is an ongoing and important process in both genders, at all temperatures, and at all ages. The most reasonable assumption then, given the limits of the literature, is that your hands sweat continuously and steadily at a given temperature, and it is highly likely that you are noticing it when wearing gloves only because the vapor barrier caused by the gloves prohibits evaporation.

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