why we got hot temperature when we are in fever or sick?
Question by kushtaka: why we got hot temperature when we are in fever or sick?
what trigger in our body that make it high temperature.
Can you help? Leave your own answer in the comments!
5 Responses to why we got hot temperature when we are in fever or sick?
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It is your bodies way of trying to heal the infection….your white blood cells go into overdrive to force the infection out of your body…if you are sick and your fever is not too high(under 101.4) you should not treat the fever, let your body do its job!
drcwhetzel
June 20, 2013 at 7:49 pm
fever is a sign that your body responding to any infections in your body.
Cezanne
June 20, 2013 at 8:35 pm
Sometimes a fever can be a good thing
It is part of the immune response to infection.
It has bee suggested that fever may raise the body’s temperature enough to limit the growth of bacteria and viruses sensitive to temperature. A fever won’t actually kill a virus or bacterium, but it may adversely affect its replication rate. Most microorganisms have a narrow ‘optimal’ temperature- push the environment above or below that, and their growth will be limited. It is hard to lower your body temp so it gets upregulated instead. Fefer does seem to be a general response and not targeted at particular infections.
A fever is caused by the immune system releasing cytokines – chemical messengers which signal a part of the brain known as the Hypothalamus to increase the temperature of our bodies.
Fever is still poorly understood, and I don’t know of any study that has compared treating it to not. I imagine if there was any strong indication out there that people definitely do better with fever treated/not treated, then it would be well known. Generally treatment is thought not to hurt, and does makes a person feel better.
David
June 20, 2013 at 8:52 pm
You should always let a fever run it’s course. It’s your body’s way of killing the virus inside of you.
If you monitor your temperature during a fever and it’s not above 104 you have nothing to worry about.
Jane
June 20, 2013 at 9:29 pm
Fever is a response to inflammation and/or infection and serves 3 very important purposes:
1) It creates an environment inhospitable to some organisms. Bacteria, for example, do best within the normal range of human body temperatures, which is 97.6 to 99.6 so an elevated temperature makes it more difficult for many bacteria to survive. Viruses can withstand a much greater range, temperatures that would kill us, so this doesn’t work so well against them.
2) Fever causes the body to remove iron from the blood and hoard it in the spleen and liver. Bacteria need this iron for metabolism. Viruses have no metabolism so this doesn’t work against them.
3) And last but not least, fever attracts more white blood cells to the site of infection. And many cells in the body produce a chemical, called a cytokine, that’s been named interleukin-1, or IL-1. IL-1 interferes with viral replication. Our body produces other interleukins, too.
“what trigger in our body that make it high temperature.” — This part gets a little technical but I’ll try to keep it simple. As I wrote above, fever is a response to inflammation and/or infection and fever is a response to these by the immune system. Many things happen when a pathogen or toxin is detected in the body. One of these activities is the production of prostaglandins. Different prostaglandins have different function and some prostaglandins, called pyrogens, signal the hypothalamus of the brain to elevate body temperature. The hypothalamus is the part of the brain that regulates body temperature, much like a thermostat. Later in an infection, the brain takes over the production of pyrogens.
TweetyBird
June 20, 2013 at 10:05 pm