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Mark Silen, MD, MBA
Portland, Ore

Arch Surg. 2003;138:174.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Gore and his colleagues have performed an elegant study on febrile children with burn wounds. They studied the effects of fever on the metabolic response in these patients and have prepared an excellent article. The study was designed to define the energy "cost" of fever in these patients by using indirect calorimetry and the net flux of phenylalanine across the leg as an index of muscle catabolism. Febrile patients, as expected, exhibited increases in heart rate, serum glucose level, oxygen consumption, and energy expenditure. Indeed, febrile patients also exhibited a significantly greater efflux of phenylalanine from the leg compared with patients without fever, indicating an increase in muscle catabolism with fever.

The authors point out the most significant problems with their own study. First, there can be no cause-and-effect relationship established between the presence of fever and an increase in muscle catabolism. If the authors had . . . [Full Text of this Article]

RELATED ARTICLE

Influence of Fever on the Hypermetabolic Response in Burn-Injured Children
Dennis C. Gore, David Chinkes, Arthur Sanford, David W. Hart, Steven E. Wolf, and David N. Herndon
Arch Surg. 2003;138(2):169-174.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT