‘Normal’ Human Body Temperature Has Changed in the Last Century

Whether you have a stomachache, a wrist sprain or a chronic disease, one of the first things doctors and nurses will do at an appointment is take your temperature. A normal temperature means your body is humming along the way it should. A higher temperature means you have a fever, and shows your body could be fighting an infection. And since 1871, “normal” has meant 98.6°F (37°C). That number was determined by a German physician, based on millions of readings from 25,000 German patients, taken by sticking thermometers under their arms. When doctors in the U.S. and Europe repeated the experiment in local populations, they came up with the same number, so it stuck. But in a paper published last week in eLife, researchers at Stanford University reported that the normal human body temperature has dropped since that time. And that means the standards that doctors have been using to define normal temperature and fever might need to be reworked. Julie Parsonnet, a professor of medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine, and her team analyzed data from three large databases involving more than 677,000 temperature readings from nearly 190,000 people, collected between 1862 and 2017. The first dataset is drawn from health information collected on Union Army soldiers from 1862 to 1930. The second, the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, comes from U.S. population-wide data from 1971 to 1975. The third is the most recent, and includes measuremen...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized fever health inflammation Research Source Type: news