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Is a fever good for You?
How does fever help control infections?
How does a fever affect the body?
A fever of 101 degrees or higher is commonly associated with the flu. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s actually part of the body’s immune response. Fluids and anti-inflammatory medicines can help you stay comfortable.
- Overview
- A temperature-sensitive signaling pathway
- The protein that alters temperature reactivity
Researchers claim that fevers are more than just a symptom of illness or infection. They found that elevated body temperature sets in motion a series of mechanisms that regulate our immune system.
When we are healthy, our body temperature tends to gravitate around 37°C (98.6°F).
But when faced with an infection or virus, body temperature often goes up, resulting in a fever.
When someone’s body temperature rises to about 38°C (100.4°F0, doctors classify it as a slight fever. Larger increases in body temperature to around 39.5°C (103.1°F) count as a high fever.
When a person has the flu, for instance, they may experience a mild and uncomfortable fever. This may drive many people to seek natural or over-the-counter remedies to treat it.
However, fevers are not always a bad sign. Mild fevers are a good indication that the immune system is doing its job. But fevers are not just a byproduct of the immune response.
A signaling pathway called Nuclear Factor kappa B (NF-κB) plays an important role in the body’s inflammation response in the context of infection or disease.
NF-κB are proteins that help to regulate gene expression and the production of certain immune cells.
These proteins respond to the presence of viral or bacterial molecules in the system, and that is when they start switching relevant genes related to the immune response on and off at cellular level.
Dysregulated NF-κB activity has been linked with the presence of autoimmune diseases, such as psoriasis, irritable bowel diseases, and rheumatoid arthritis.
The researchers note that NF-κB activity tends to slow down the lower the body temperature. But when the body temperature is elevated over 37°C (98.6°F), it tends to become more intense.
Why does this happen? The answer, they hypothesized, might be found by looking at a protein known as A20, encoded by the gene with the same name.
The researchers involved in the study wondered whether blocking the expression of the A20 gene would affect the way in which NF-κB functioned.
And, sure enough, they found that in the absence of the A20 protein, NF-κB activity no longer reacted to changes in body temperature, and its activity therefore no longer increased in case of a fever.
These findings might also be relevant to the normal fluctuations in temperature that our bodies undergo every day, and how these may affect our response to pathogens.
As Prof. Rand explains, our body clock regulates our internal temperature and determines mild fluctuations — of about 1.15°C at a time — during wakefulness and sleep.
So, he says, “[T]he lower body temperature during sleep might provide a fascinating explanation into how shift work, jet lag, or sleep disorders cause increased inflammatory disease.”
Although many genes whose expression is regulated by NF-κB were not temperature-sensitive, the researchers found that certain genes — which played a key role in the regulation of inflammation and which impacted cell communication — did, in fact, respond differently to different temperatures.
Nov 23, 2020 · Fever works by causing more damage to pathogens and infected cells than it does to healthy cells in the body. During pandemic COVID-19, the benefits of allowing fever to occur probably outweigh its harms, for individuals and for the public at large.
- Sylwia Wrotek, Edmund K LeGrand, Artur Dzialuk, Joe Alcock
- 10.1093/emph/eoaa044
- 2021
- Evol Med Public Health. 2021; 9(1): 26-35.
Sep 11, 2023 · The main explanation for how fever helps control infections is that higher temperatures put heat-induced stress on pathogens, killing them or at least inhibiting their growth.
Mar 20, 2019 · Fevers can have some cool benefits. That heating boosts our immunity by speeding disease-fighting cells to an infection. A fever may be (mostly) good for us, whether we're babies, teens or adults. A new study shows how it speeds infection-fighting cells to where they’ll do the body good. Aynur_sib/iStockphoto. By Silke Schmidt.
Sep 4, 2023 · An increase in core body temperature is known to improve survival and resolve infections. While an increased body temperature subsequently leads to an increased metabolic cost, it is known that the survival benefits outweigh the metabolic cost associated with a fever.
Febrile temperatures are so closely linked to the inflammatory response that heat (calor) is one of the four cardinal signs of inflammation, along with pain (dolor), redness (rubor), and swelling (tumour), as described by Celsus in ~30 BC. 1 The induction of fever in endothermic (warm-blooded) animals occurs at a high metabolic cost such that a ...
