Functions
The integumentary system has multiple roles in homeostasis. All body systems work in an interconnected manner to maintain the internal conditions essential to the function of the body. The skin has an important job of protecting the body and acts as the body’s first line of defense against infection, temperature change, and other challenges to homeostasis. Functions include:
- Protect the body’s internal living tissues and organs
- Protect against invasion by infectious organisms
- Protect the body from dehydration
- Protect the body against abrupt changes in temperature, maintain homeostasis
- Help excrete waste materials through perspiration
- Act as a receptor for touch, pressure, pain, heat, and cold (see Somatosensory system)
- Protect the body against sunburns by secreting melanin
- Generate vitamin D through exposure to ultraviolet light
- Store water, fat, glucose, and vitamin D
- Maintenance of the body form
- Formation of new cells from stratum germinativum to repair minor injuries
- Aid in physical examination as color of the skin may indicate many conditions e.g. it becomes yellowish in jaundice
Read more about this topic: Integumentary System
Famous quotes containing the word functions:
“When Western people train the mind, the focus is generally on the left hemisphere of the cortex, which is the portion of the brain that is concerned with words and numbers. We enhance the logical, bounded, linear functions of the mind. In the East, exercises of this sort are for the purpose of getting in tune with the unconscious—to get rid of boundaries, not to create them.”
—Edward T. Hall (b. 1914)
“If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“Nobody is so constituted as to be able to live everywhere and anywhere; and he who has great duties to perform, which lay claim to all his strength, has, in this respect, a very limited choice. The influence of climate upon the bodily functions ... extends so far, that a blunder in the choice of locality and climate is able not only to alienate a man from his actual duty, but also to withhold it from him altogether, so that he never even comes face to face with it.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)