In life there are many established rules of thumb and bits of common knowledge. One of them is that the normal temperature of the human body is usually 37 degrees.
Of course, it has been known for a long time that the temperature varies, but the idea of a normal temperature of 37 degrees sits stubbornly.
Several studies from Stanford University in the United States seem to show that we are actually slightly cooler on average.
A statistical analysis of the measurement results of hundreds of thousands of patients shows that the typical temperature of a healthy person is rather 36.6 degrees.
This is according to the group’s latest study, which was published by the American Medical Association JAMA Internal Medicine in the journal.
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“Heat varies depending on the person and the situation.”
“Large some people, even doctors, think normal temperature is 37 degrees. However, the temperature varies depending on the person and the situation, and only very rarely is it this high”, says the doctor, epidemiologist and public health scientist Julie Parsons from Stanford University in the bulletin.
So what is it about? The idea of a normal temperature of 37 degrees is more than 150 years ago.
German doctor Carl Wunderlich measured the temperature of up to 25,000 patients and published its results in 1868, says Quarterly Journal of Medicine. From these measurements, he found the range for a healthy person to be 36.3–37.5 degrees. The average value was around 37 degrees.
He reportedly took the measurements from the armpit. The thermometer of that time was a tube no less than 30 centimeters long.
In the new in the study, the Americans analyzed about half a million measurement results taken from 125,000 patients in the United States between 2008 and 2017. The measurements were taken from the mouth, where the temperature is usually a little higher than when measuring from the armpit.
Doctor visits that were in some way related to heat or hypothermia, or infectious diseases, which also affect body temperature, were eliminated from the patient data. Artificial intelligence was used as an aid in screening.
The results were then spun in a statistical mill from many angles, and the following information popped out.
Normal heat the range turned out to be 36.2–36.9 degrees in healthy people, now rounded, with the average being 36.6 degrees.
When the persons were divided according to age, weight, gender and other body characteristics, the most typical normal temperature in no group was as high as 37 degrees.
Of course, some patients could have it – the result of a 20-year-old overweight woman was as high as 37.9 degrees measured in the afternoon.
Similar results have also been obtained in a previous study by Harvard University. Here too British Medical Journal In a study published in 2017 in the magazine, the average temperature was 36.6 degrees.
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“We are healthier today than before.”
Are we so today cooler than in the 19th century? It is possible.
Likewise, previous research by Parsonnet’s group also seems to show that the normal human temperature has slowly decreased over the course of 150 years.
In the one published in 2020 in the article compared measurements taken from US Civil War veterans in the 19th century with patients from the 1970s and 2000s.
The bill seemed clear here as well. Perhaps a body temperature of 37 degrees was once a typical normal, nowadays the usual reading is half a degree less.
One possibility, of course, is that the old material is not completely comparable. No matter how you sift through the material, it is difficult to take all variables into account. On the other hand, it makes sense that the development of society could also have affected body temperature.
“We are healthier today than before,” says Dr. Parsonnet of The New York Times in the interview.
Diseases and inflammations are treated in a completely different way today than in the 19th century, dental care has developed, as has nutrition. In the past, people may have had various low-grade infections and other ailments that raised their body temperature.
Parsonnet research is also inspired by personal experience.
Parsonnet tells about her mother-in-law, whose heart infection went unnoticed for months because her body temperature did not reach the fever limit, which is generally considered to be 37.8 degrees.
The mother-in-law’s temperature was measured at 37 degrees, which, however, was higher than usual in her case.
We learned an important thing from this: instead of staring at a certain average reading, the normal temperature varies for all of us individually and also according to the time of day. For example, body temperature is often lower in the morning than in the afternoon.
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Correction November 12 at 22:15: Removed mention of median, which was incorrectly defined as the most common value.
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