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 team found that average body temperatures in the earliest database, from the Union Army veterans, were higher than the temperatures recorded in each of the latter two periods. On average, the temperatures dropped by 0.03°C and 0.29°C per decade for men and women, respectively, over the 150-year span.
“In previous studies people who found lower temperatures [in more recent times] thought the temperatures taken in the 19th century were just wrong,” Parsonnet says. “I don’t think they were wrong; I think the temperature has gone down.” It makes sense that body temperatures would change over time, says Parsonnet. “We have grown in height on average, which changes our temperature, and we have gotten heavier, which also changes our body temperature,” she says. “[Today,] we have better nutrition, better medical care, and better public health. We have air conditioning and heating, so we live more comfortable lives at a consistent 68°F to 72°F in our homes, so it’s not a struggle to keep the body warm.
Perhaps the most important factor, however, is the development of treatments for infectious diseases over the last century. “We have gotten rid of many of the inflammatory conditions that people had—tuberculosis, syphilis, periodontal disease, wounds that didn’t heal, dysentery, diarrhea—with antibiotics and vaccines,” says Parsonnet. “Plus, we conquered general inflammation with non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and statins, all of which enable us to live almost inflammation-free.
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