The brain’s temperature is two degrees higher than the rest of the body, and its variations can be used to prevent deaths in people with brain injuries.
You may have noticed that when your computer is processing something complex (editing a video or applying effects to a photo) it gets hotter than usual. The same can happen with our brain, whose internal temperature sometimes exceeds 40 degrees.
The average healthy brain temperature of 38.5 degrees Celsius is more than two degrees higher than that measured in the mouth, according to a group of researchers in their article in Brain magazine. In the deepest regions of the brain, it often exceeds 40 degrees, a value that would be diagnosed as a fever in other parts of the body.
The team at the MRC Molecular Biology Laboratory in Cambridge recruited 40 healthy volunteers between the ages of 20 and 40 and measured their temperature in different regions of the brain in the morning, afternoon and evening using magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS). . In all the subjects, the brain temperature fluctuated by almost a degree Celsius throughout the day, falling at night and rising again in the morning. The highest values were measured in the afternoon. The record was broken by a woman with 40.9 degrees Celsius in the thalamus, the region of the brain that warmed the most on average.
On average, women’s brain temperature reached about 0.4 degrees Celsius higher than men’s. The researchers suspect this has to do with the menstrual cycle: temperatures are highest after ovulation, and most women were at that stage when measurements were taken. Temperature also increased with age, especially in the deeper regions of the brain.
From these data, the researchers created what they say is the first four-dimensional map of brain temperature. This map was used to compare values measured in more than 100 intensive care patients with head trauma, and the result was that their brain temperature averaged one degree lower. In addition, it fluctuated between 32.6 and 42.3 degrees Celsius, a higher range than in healthy volunteers (36.1 to 40.9ºC), and only a quarter of the patients had the typical daily temperature rhythm of people. healthy. When the rhythm was changed, the risk of death was multiplied by 20.
However, these brain temperature variations in injured patients are not cause and effect, but rather an indicator of risk, which has great clinical value.
REFERENCE
A daily temperature rhythm in the human brain predicts survival after brain injury