Fever

An elevation of body temperature above the normal, which accompanies many diseases and infections. The rise in temperature (normal is 98.68 degree F or 37.5 degree C) is not a disease but a sign of disoredrs inside the body. Rising temperature is the body's mechanism of destroying infection-causing germs. There's nothing alarming if the temperature is below 102 degree F.

Causes Of Fever:
Its cause is the production of the body of endogenous pyrogen, which acts on the thermo-regulatory center in the hypothalamus in the brain. This responds by promoting mechanisms that increase heat generation and lessen heat loss, leading to a rise in temperature. Fever is the main factor in many infections caused by bacteria or viruses and results from toxins produced by the growth of these organisms.

Types Of Fever:
Fevers are classed as specific, intermittent, remittent and relapsing according to their causative agent.

i. Continuous Fever: This type of fever is characterized by body temperatures which remains higher than normal throughout the day and does not fluctuate more than 1 degree C in 24 hours. Examples of such fevers are lobar pneumonia, typhoid, urinary tract infection, brucellosis, or typhus. However typhoid fevers may show a step by step increase and a high plateau.

ii. Specific Fevers: The specific fevers are caused by particularly contagious diseases such as scarlet fever, small-pox and measles, for example. The specific fevers are all infectious. The cause of specific fevers is a microscopic organism, a plant, which finds access to the body through the lungs or skin, and by its growth within the human organism, occasions the derangement of function which we know as fever.

iii. Intermittent Fevers: In this type of fever the rise in temperature is present only for a certain period of time (which maybe 24 hrs or 48 hrs or 72 hrs), and later cycles back to normal. Examples are malaria, pyaemia, or septicemia.

iv. Remittent: Temperature remains above normal throughout the day and fluctuates more than 1 °C in 24 hours, e.g., infective endocarditis.

v. Remittent Fever: A fever pattern in which temperature varies during each 24 hour period, but never reaches normal. Most fevers are remittent and the pattern is not characteristic of any disease, although in the 19th century it was considered a diagnostic term.

vi. Pel-Ebstein fever: A specific kind of fever associated with Hodgkin's lymphoma, being high for one week and low for the next week and so on. However, there is some debate as to whether this pattern truly exists.

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Symptoms Of Fever, In Adults, Children

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