This illustrates what we hoped we could do with control of skin temperature. We thought that we could use a square-wave pattern to cause dynamic responses that would be easy to interpret. Simultaneously with the abrupt change skin temperature you should see a corresponding change in blood flow uncontaminated by any influence of core temperature because it has not had time to change. Later on, the core temperature will change and you will see the independent influence of core temperature. It would have been nice if it had worked this way. As it turned out, we did not get a clean separation between periods of change in core and skin temperature. Nonetheless, it was clear that skin blood flow responds promptly to skin temperature changes. Also, the core temperature response was clearly inverse to the skin temperature response. Details can be seen in the paper, Savage, M. V. and G. L. Brengelmann. Control of skin blood flow in the neutral zone of human body temperature regulation. J. Appl. Physiol. 80: 1249-1257, 1996.
Results are illustrated briefly on a separate page, some discussion of the results appears in a page on the significance of the temperature changes in skin and core temperature and in a page on the significance of the flow changes.
Other pages supply some details
on methods:
control of skin temperature
measurement of forearm blood flow
placement of the esophageal probe for body temperature
Other links: next pg