What happens if a newborn is too warm?

After a child is born, parents are always afraid that the child will catch a cold, so they often dress the child in too many clothes or cover him with too thick a quilt. If the weather is hot, it may have a certain impact on the child, because when it is hot, the child's metabolism is faster, which can easily lead to hypoxia. At this time, it is easy for the child to suffer from infant heatstroke syndrome. Let's take a look at this aspect.

What happens if a newborn is too warm?

When the fever is high, the body's metabolism speeds up and the oxygen consumption increases. In addition, the lack of fresh air in the bed may cause hypoxia in children. Since young infants, especially newborns less than one month old, are unable to escape from the warm environment, the condition will often rapidly deteriorate if it continues, leading to internal environment disorders and multiple organ damage or failure. Generally, the children show symptoms of first red and then white face, crying and restlessness, slow reaction, sunken eye sockets, blue lips, and rapid and labored breathing.

Due to the excessive sweating and water loss after being covered up, the cerebral blood flow is reduced, the brain tissue suffers from ischemia and hypoxia, and cerebral edema may occur secondary to it. In severe cases, ischemic necrosis of brain cells can lead to permanent damage to the central nervous system, leaving sequelae such as epilepsy and mental retardation.

The disease has an acute onset and severe symptoms, and can easily affect multiple organs such as the heart, brain, kidneys, and gastrointestinal tract. The mortality rate can be as high as 18.33%, and there are many sequelae, among which secondary epilepsy is the most common, followed by cerebral palsy, blindness, aphasia, and mental retardation. Obviously, infant heat syndrome is entirely caused by human factors, and because of the serious consequences, parents should pay enough attention to it.

The temperature regulation center of infants and young children is not yet fully functional, and their adaptability to the external temperature is poor, especially for infants within 150 days after birth. The heat production is very high, but the heat dissipation through sweating is relatively slow. The incoordination between heat production and heat dissipation makes infants prone to high fever under the influence of the environment. If the child keeps warm for too long, the body's heat dissipation will be affected, the body temperature will rise sharply, and the child will be in a high fever state.

When the temperature is high, the peripheral blood vessels will dilate compensatorily, sweating will increase, and high fever will also cause the body's hypermetabolism and increased oxygen consumption. In addition, the child is trapped in the quilt and lacks fresh air, which leads to hypoxia.

What is infant heat syndrome

Infant heat syndrome is also known as stuffy syndrome, blanket syndrome, and quilt syndrome. This disease is mainly caused by over-warming the child or keeping him/her covered for too long.

This can happen when the child is covered too tightly or too thickly at home, when the temperature in the room is too high, or when the child is wrapped too much or too tightly when going out. It is more common in infants under 1 year old, especially in newborns less than one month old. It usually occurs in cold seasons, with the peak period from November to April of the following year. Most of the children come from rural areas. Most children are healthy before the onset of the disease, while a few have symptoms of cold or intestinal infection such as cough, runny nose, fever, and diarrhea. The body surface area of ​​newborns or infants is relatively larger than that of adults, so they dissipate heat faster than adults. If they are covered for too long or kept too warm, the temperature around the child's body will rise sharply. At this time, wrapping too much will affect the heat dissipation and put the body in a high fever state. At this time, the small blood vessels on the human skin may dilate compensatorily to accelerate heat dissipation through skin evaporation, that is, sweating and increased breathing, so the child will sweat a lot and even become dehydrated.