Facts about Fever
Increased heart rate and vasoconstriction contribute to increased blood pressure in fever.
Fever can be uncomfortable for the patient and be accompanied by fatigue, nausea, chills, sweating, and so forth.
Most of the time, fever types can not be used to find the underlying cause.
Fever is an important signal that there is something wrong in the body, and it can be used for follow-up.
Elderly patients may have a decreased ability to generate body heat during a fever, so even a low-grade fever can have serious underlying causes in geriatrics.
Children develop higher temperatures with activities like playing, but this is not fever because their set-point is normal.
Aspirin can abolish fever because it inhibits the action of prostaglandin synthetase (and thus does not effect temperature when used in the absence of fever) (Blakemore and Jennett 2001).
Persistent fever, which cannot be explained after repeated routine clinical inquiries, is described obviously, as a fever of unknown origin.
Fevers may be useful to some extent since they allow the body to reach high temperatures.
Febricula is a mild fever of short duration, of indefinite origin, and without any distinctive pathology.
One model for the mechanism of fever caused by exogenous pyrogens includes lipopolysaccharide (LPS), which is a cell wall component of gram-negative bacteria.
A fever occurs when the thermostat resets at a higher temperature (Longe 2006).
A very high fever in a small child may trigger seizures, and a fever accompanied by the above symptoms may signal the presence of a serious illness, such as meningitis (Longe 2006).
Carl Wunderlich discovered that fever is not a disease, but a symptom of disease.
Treatment of fever should be based primarily on lowering the setpoint, but facilitating heat loss may also contribute.
The person who is developing the fever has a cold sensation, and an increase in heart rate, muscle tone, and shivering attempt to counteract the perceived hypothermia, thereby reaching the new thermoregulatory set-point.
Fever differs from hyperthermia, which is an increase in body temperature over the body’s thermoregulatory set-point (due to excessive heat production or insufficient thermoregulation, or both).
Addressing of the underlying causes is the most effective treatment of a fever, such as the use of antibiotics to deal with bacterial infections (Longe 2006).
The overall conclusion seems to be that both aggressive treatment of fever (Schulman et al.
Most people take medication against fever because the symptoms cause discomfort.
Theoretically, fever has been conserved during evolution because of its advantage for host defense (Schaffner 2006).
In any case, fever must be brought under control in instances when fever escalates to hyperpyrexia and tissue damage is imminent.
Technically, fever is most accurately characterized as a temporary elevation in the body’s thermoregulatory set-point, usually by about 1-2°C.
Fever increases heart rate and metabolism, thus potentially putting an additional strain on elderly patients, patients with heart disease, and so forth.
When a patient has or is suspected of having a fever, that person's body temperature is measured using a thermometer.
PGE2 acts near the ventromedial preoptic area (VMPO) of the anterior hypothalamus and the parvocellular portion of the periventricular nucleus (PVN), where the thermal properties of fever emerge.
An oral temperature at or above 37.5°C (99.5°F) is commonly considered a fever if resulting from such causes as a viral or bacterial infection, an allergic reaction, drugs, damage to the hypothalamus, and so forth.
There is no risk of yellow fever in South Africa. The government of South Africa requires proof of yellow fever vaccination only if you are arriving from a country with risk of yellow fever. This does not include the US.
Now, when we have fever the body temperature is raised. ... The enzymes activity will be changed or affected because they cannot function well at higher temperatures, as the reason why people die of high fevers because the enzymes will be denatured and their body functions are not able to stay normal.