Infrared thermography based studies on the effect of age on localized cold stress induced thermoregulation in human

Abstract

Thermoregulatory control of blood flow plays an important role in maintaining the human body temperature and it provides physiological resistance against extreme environmental thermal stresses. To understand the role of age on thermal signals from veins and the thermoregulatory mechanism, the dynamic variation of the vein temperature on the hands of 17 human subjects, under a localized cold stress, was studied using infrared thermography. It was observed that the vein temperature of the stimulated hand initially decreased with time up to a time interval (called ‘inversion time’), which was attributed to the localized cutaneous vasoconstriction. Beyond inversion time, a rise in the vein temperature of the stimulated hand was observed. A shift in the inversion time to higher values was observed for the older subjects, which was attributed to the reduced efficiency and responsiveness of the cutaneous vasoconstriction mechanism in these subjects. Our studies indicated that the inversion time increased linearly with subject age with strong positive Pearson’s correlation coefficient of 0.94. It was also observed that the contralateral symmetry in vasoconstriction was much lower in older subjects than the younger subjects. The absolute difference between the left and right inversion time varied between 11–118s and 5–28s for the older and younger subjects, respectively. Our study clearly demonstrated that infrared thermography is one of the most effective experimental tool for studying dynamic variation in vein pixel temperature under localized thermal stresses.