In case parents needed to hear another thing we?ve been getting wrong all along, researchers from Stanford University published a study recently that suggests we might need to rethink what we?ve been told are normal and fever temperatures. The study analyzed databases from the mid 1800s to 2017, and found that humans? normal body temperatures are now running almost 0.5 degrees Celsius cooler, compared to the 1800s.
This means that normal human body temperature isn?t the 37C or 98.6F that most of us have been taught. Instead, ?normal? seems closer to 36.5C or 97.7F. What?s perhaps most surprising is that this isn?t even news. A number of studies in recent decades have shown that normal isn?t 37C.
We spoke to Jonathan Hausmann, a rheumatologist at Boston Children?s Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, about what this means for parents. Why are our normal body temperatures going down"
I’m not sure normal body temperature is going down. The ?normal? body temperature of 98.6F comes from research done in the mid-1800s by a German physician, Dr. Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich. It?s been called into question whether his thermometer was properly calibrated, so it?s possible the measurement was wrong to begin with.
But this most recent study is really interesting. It includes many more datasets, outside of the Wunderlich study, and shows declining temperatures over the years. There could be many reasons for this. It?s possible that people in the earlier da...