Pyrexia: An update on importance in clinical practice

Pyrexic patients are usually attended with some scepticism by anaesthesiologists. Main reasons are the absence of comprehensible guidelines pertaining to anaesthesia in such patients and the presence of innumerable aetiologies of pyrexia. This article has tried to fill the existing void in the medical literature regarding anaesthesia in a patient with pyrexia. The article aims to discuss common and relevant causes of pyrexia, their pathophysiology in anaesthetic perspective, and the subsequent anaesthetic management, though a detailed discourse on all the entities causing pyrexia is beyond the scope of this article. This article will also touch upon the thermoregulatory alterations during anaesthesia. The literature search was performed manually using text and reference books, peer-reviewed journals, online and offline and through internet search engines Google, PubMed and Medline databases, using search terms ‘perioperative pyrexia or fever, anaesthesia and thermoregulation’. Articles from 1980 to 2013 in English language were selected.