We do not endorse non-Cleveland Clinic products or services. That widely accepted number originated from a study done in the mids. But newer studies suggest the average person today actually runs a little cooler than that — somewhere between So which is right? Everyone has their own ordinary — and even that is more of a sliding scale than one set number. Your body temperature can move up and down and all around, but it usually stays within a certain window.
It often rises from childhood into adulthood before dipping during the later years in life. By stages, it looks like this with all temperatures for an oral reading. A part of your brain called the hypothalamus is responsible for this. When you get too cold, it signals your body to preserve heat by shrinking your blood vessels, and to produce heat by shivering.
And when you get too hot, it signals your body to make sweat to cool off. Ford says. The figure was probably accurate in , when German doctor Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich found it to be the average armpit temperature of 25, patients.
Times have changed, though, according to the recent paper : the average American now seems to run more than a degree F lower. Stanford University researchers looked at data from Civil War soldiers and veterans and two more recent cohorts to confirm that body temperatures among American men averaged around Their data find an average for men and women of The study suggests that in the process of altering our surroundings, we have also altered ourselves, says senior author Julie Parsonnet of Stanford.
The researchers did not determine the cause of the apparent temperature drop, but Parsonnet thinks it could be a combination of factors, including warmer clothing, indoor temperature controls, a more sedentary way of life and—perhaps most significantly—a decline in infectious diseases.
She notes that people today are much less likely to have infections such as tuberculosis, syphilis or gum disease. In places like the U. That perpetually degree-F office may feel cold to some, but it does not stress out the human body the way it would to spend the night in a degree-F cave. It is unclear whether those who live closer to the way people did in the s—with more infection or less climate control—have higher body temperatures.
A paper showed that infections accounted for about 10 percent of resting metabolism in that population and that lower metabolism was associated with slightly lower body temperature, says Michael Gurven, an anthropologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who conducted that study but was not involved in the new one. Parsonnet says she suspects it might be healthier to have a lower metabolism and body temperature. And she hopes to explore that connection more in the future.
A recent study, for example, found the average temperature of 25, British patients to be In a study published today in eLife , Parsonnet and her colleagues explore body temperature trends and conclude that temperature changes since the time of Wunderlich reflect a true historical pattern, rather than measurement errors or biases.
Myroslava Protsiv, a former Stanford research scientist who is now at the Karolinska Institute, is the lead author. The researchers propose that the decrease in body temperature is the result of changes in our environment over the past years, which have in turn driven physiological changes.
Parsonnet and her colleagues analyzed temperatures from three datasets covering distinct historical periods. The earliest set, compiled from military service records, medical records and pension records from Union Army veterans of the Civil War, captures data between and and includes people born in the early s.
A set from the U. The researchers used the , temperature measurements from these datasets to develop a linear model that interpolated temperature over time. The model confirmed body temperature trends that were known from previous studies, including increased body temperature in younger people, in women, in larger bodies and at later times of the day.
The researchers determined that the body temperature of men born in the early to mids is on average 1. Similarly, they determined that the body temperature of women born in the early to mids is on average 0.
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