How does fever help the body

They found the immune cells that grew in the febrile environment produced a suite of molecules called heat shock proteins. One of these proteins, known as Hsp90, quickly set in motion a cascade of events that eventually directed the immune cells to the infection, Chen and team report today in the journal Immunity.

Indeed, disrupting the pathway with a mutation in Hsp90 impaired the ability of mice infected with Salmonella to fight off the infection, the researchers found.

The discovery suggests that therapies to raise Hsp levels could help fight infections, while lowering them could help those with allergies or autoimmune diseases by slowing down inflammation, Chen said. Instead he recommends taking a fever-reducing drug only after several hours with a high temperature.

That way Hsp90 has had a chance to mobilize the immune system to clear the infection. Register or Log In. The Magazine Shop. Body temperature also tends to be higher in women than in men — and even within women, it is approximately 0. Younger people also tend to have higher body temperatures than older people. There is even evidence that our body temperatures may be falling over time — possibly because we are exposed to fewer pathogens in the modern world, meaning our immune systems are less active and our bodies less inflamed.

One recent study found that, on average, body temperature in the US has fallen by around 0. Men born then were 0. The average body temperature for 21st-century humans is about The most common cause of this is infection.

The hypothalamus is responsible, among other things, for controlling body temperature, and it responds to these signals by releasing hormones that cause various heat-boosting responses. Blood vessels in our skin constrict so less heat is lost at the body's surface. Fat cells start burning energy and our muscles rapidly contract, causing shivering — both of which warm us up.

As a result, the body's temperature starts to rise. If it rises too far, that can be fatal. Our cells begin to die, releasing proteins into the blood that can damage the kidneys and other organs, resulting in their failure. The exact temperature this happens at probably depends on the source of a person's fever, as well as other factors such as how hydrated they are.

Fever is associated with a higher pulse and breathing rate, placing additional strain on the heart and lungs that could be risky in seriously ill people. So if fever can kill us, why does it happen? Fever-like responses are observed in many organisms, suggesting fever's evolutionary origins may stretch back hundreds of millions of years.

Even some plants have been shown to increase their leaf temperature in response to fungal infections, while cold-blooded creatures will deliberately raise their body temperature if they have an infection, by sitting on a hot rock, for instance. In the case of the desert iguana , not being allowed to do so was seen to cause a 75 per cent reduction in survival rates.

That suggests fever might not be all bad. The idea that fever might actually have medical benefits goes way back. In , the Nobel prize for medicine was awarded to the Austrian physician Julius Wagner-Jauregg for his discovery that triggering a high and persistent fever by inoculating people with malaria could treat their syphilis; the malaria was later treated with quinine.

Modern medicine has moved on considerably, and so has the way we think about fever. It is easy to see it as the thing that is making us ill, not a symptom along with other things like a runny nose or sore throat.

Fever can also feel unpleasant, and many of us feel glad when our temperature drops after taking some medication. From all these perspectives, it makes sense to want to bring temperatures down as quickly as possible. That's certainly how the medical profession views things, says Peters. But there are hints we might be missing something. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS.

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The fever that accompanies many infections prompts production of heat-shock proteins, which protect cells from cold, heat and other stresses. A fever fights infection by helping immune cells to crawl along blood-vessel walls to attack invading microbes. Immunity Download references. Article 10 NOV