Somatotype and infrared thermographic imaging

It is possible that skin surface body temperature may be a better representation of the state of health of the body, than the currently used single 'core' temperature measures. As such the composite skin surface body temperature could be of medical benefit in diagnosis and for objectifying the progression of neurovascular abnormalities, such as in complex regional pain syndrome type I (CRPS 1). However, before any determination of medical potential can be made, it is important to determine those factors that can affect the normal thermal image characteristics. To the authors' knowledge, there have been no reported studies on the effect of anthropomorphic variations on average whole body skin surface temperature. We therefore investigated the possibility of such a relationship in a group of asymptomatic male subjects. Forty-one subjects volunteered for and gave written consent to undertake this ethically approved study. The subjects were requested not to have any manual therapy, exercise or even shower before imaging. Upon arrival at the environmentally controlled laboratory, they disrobed and waited twenty minutes to equilibrate, before infrared images were taken. The anthropomorphic data (height, mass and skin-fold thickness) was obtained following imaging. The data shows a significant correlation (p<0.05) between percentage body fat and the average whole body skin surface temperature. The relationship between somatotype and average whole body skin surface temperature was borderline significant (p=0.05). The trend implies that ectomorph-mesomorphs have the highest average whole body skin surface temperature and that endomorphs appear to have the lowest. Therefore, if the subject increases their body mass, any reduction in "thermal body print" may not be the effect of a clinical dysfunction but more likely is because of the increased body mass. The implications from these results are that it would appear necessary to consider somatotype or at least percentage body fat assessment in the standard imaging protocols. This would become an imperative for any medical analysis of whole body temperature or whole body temperature distribution using infrared thermometry.