CHAPTER 8 Thermoregulation
Background
• Temperature regulation is critical to survival of preterm babies. They have few mechanisms for losing heat if too warm, a high surface-area-to-volume ratio making heat loss easy, and few mechanisms for increasing body temperature when cool.
• Preterm babies have much lower body fat stores than term babies, particularly of ‘brown fat’ which is a good energy store that is able to be converted to heat readily.
• Very preterm babies have very thin, permeable skin, which allows increased water loss across the skin. This evaporative water loss is also a potent source of heat loss. Some units use a plastic wrap to ameliorate this heat loss before admission to the nursery.
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