Are you not feeling well? Check your body temperature with a thermometer. This is what we normally do. Even if we go to the doctor, the first thing he does is to check your body temperature. We know 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit or 37°C is considered as a normal temperature of the human body and is mentioned everywhere the same.
But a recent study has something interesting and unexpected to tell us. It says human body temperature has drop by 0.03 Celsius and 0.29-Celsius degree in the past century and a half.
The previous number 37°C was revealed by a German doctor Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich after he examined millions of temperature readings from 25000 patients. To prove this study right, the doctors of the US and Europe repeated the same experiment and got the same results. After that, this result was universally accepted and 37°C became the standard normal human body temperature. But Stanford university proved it outdated with its recent study.
Study at Stanford University
Recently a new study was carried out by a Julie Parsonnet, professor of medicine and her team at Stanford University in which 677,000 temperature readings from 190,000 people between 1862 and 2017 were analyzed. And the result was quite unexpected. The normal body temperature declined by 0.03 Celcius and 0.29 Celcius for men and women respectively which revealed the body temperature of men to be 0.59 degrees Celsius lower than that of men born in the early 19th century and for women, it has dropped by 0.32 degrees Celsius from the 1890s to today.
Parsonett said that she doesn’t know what these changes mean in terms of health but they are telling that humans are changing and what all humans have done in the last 150 years has made us change in ways we haven’t before.
Reasons for the temperature drop
As per the researchers, the exact reason for the change is not to know yet but it might be due to a combination of factors like warmer clothing, indoor temperature controls, decrease in infections or maybe sedentary ways of life.
The other factors that might be the cause of a drop in body temperature are height, weight, lifestyle habit and availability of better medical amenities.
Personett suspects that lower metabolism and low body temperature might be proved healthier and hopes to find out that connection soon.
Besides leading a team to analyze human body temperature, Personett has also been an active participant in the development of many infectious diseases like tuberculosis, syphilis, periodontal disease, dysentery, and general inflammation.
The body temperature is not the same for all and depends on various factors like sex, age, etc. An adult boy body temperature can be between 97 F to 99 F whereas, for babies and children, the number varies from 97.9 F to 100.4 F. Our body temperature keeps on fluctuating whole day depending on our physical activities, time of the day, eating and drinking habits and for women at the time if menstruating.
Besides this, an interesting fact is the temperature varies at different body parts too. For example, if you measure the temperature from underarms and mouth, you will get two different temperatures.
When a person has a fever, the body temperature is higher than the normal one.