Home▸Medicine & Biophysics▸Fever and Endogenous Pyrogens: Resetting the Hypothalamic Thermostat

🌡️ Fever and Endogenous Pyrogens: Resetting the Hypothalamic Thermostat

Explore how immune signals like interleukin-1 and prostaglandin E2 reprogram the hypothalamus to raise the body's temperature target, turning fever into a deliberate defense strategy rather than a malfunction.

Medicine & Biophysics3DModerate60 FPS🔥 Fire

This simulator visualizes the full signaling pathway from immune activation to fever, showing how pyrogenic cytokines released during infection travel to the organum vasculosum of the lamina terminalis, trigger prostaglandin E2 synthesis, and raise the hypothalamic set point, while separately tracking actual body temperature as it is actively driven upward by shivering and vasoconstriction toward that new target.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

🎮 How to Use

Trigger an infection event to release pyrogenic cytokines and watch the set point rise above baseline body temperature. Observe how shivering and vasoconstriction activate while actual temperature lags behind the elevated target, then introduce a COX-inhibiting antipyretic to see the set point fall and trigger the sweating, vasodilating crisis phase as temperature returns to normal.

💡 Did You Know?

During the rising phase of fever, a person can shiver so intensely their teeth chatter and they reach for blankets, all while their core temperature is climbing toward a dangerously high value, because their brain is convinced, correctly according to its newly reset target, that they are too cold.

⚙ Under the hood

feverhypothalamusimmunologypyrogensprostaglandinthermoregulationphysiologycytokines

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install