Fever

A very common illness or discomfort which can happen to anybody due to various reasons. It might be due to a very tiring day a bad lunch or many other reasons. In this topic, we will see what exactly is fever or how we describe it in medical terms.

So the body temperature which is controlled by the hypothalamus when goes out of the ordinary we get a discomfort feeling which people call fever.


So how is the body temperature controlled by the hypothalamus?
Neurons in both the anterior and posterior hypothalamus receive two kind of signals :
1. One from the peripheral nerves ie. the warm and cold receptors of the skin.
2. Second from the temperature of the blood bathing the region of the body.
These two signals get integrated by the thermoregulatory center of the hypothalamus to maintain the normal temperature of the body.
When the body is in neutral temperature the metabolism of the body produces more heat than necessary which in turn maintains the body temperature at almost 37 degrees C.

Now, what about the extreme conditions like when we go to places where the temperature of our environment is very low or high. Well, that's where the hypothalamic regulation is put to test along with other factors like immunity, our survival extinct, etc.

One can ask what does the hypothalamus does to resist the temp change?
Well, the heat which is lost from the skin is compensated by the muscles and the liver, which means they work extra in cold to produce an ample amount of heat and a bit less in warmer areas.

Now that we have known the way how the regulation of temperature is done we can say that anything which can disturb the normal working of this system can cause fever and those substances are called pyrogens. 

So, this was just a simple explanation of what is fever and what mechanism gets disturbed when we get a fever.