Introduction: Fever appears in a fourth of stroke, approximately. Its origins, (the most of them are infectious) are unknown in a minority of the cases. Some hypotheses indicate that central mechanisms like hypothalamic lesions or segregation of endogenous pyrogens may be implicated.
Objective: To evaluate the frequency of central fever during stroke and to notice if there are clinical differences between infectious and central origins of the fever.
Patients and methods: 103 patients were evaluated prospectively, if someone had fever, an investigation about an infectious origin was made. We divided the fever patients into two groups: "infectious fever" and "fever without infection documented" and we analyzed the clinical differences between them.
Results: 23% of the patients had fever, 33% without infection documented. This last group had earlier fevers. They had more clinical severity and more mortality. The fever was higher and it didn't response to the antipyretic treatment also. The others parameters didn't show any difference between the two groups.
Conclusion: The patients with fever without infection documented ( probably fever of central origin)had a defined model with its own characteristics, in a different way from infectious fever.