The average human body temperature is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Everyone knows that, right?
According to a new study published in September in JAMA Internal Medicine, everyone might be … well, wrong. Researchers evaluated the temperatures of more than 126,000 people between 2008 and 2017 and found that the average was really about 97.9 degrees. This is notably lower than the old standard of 98.6, established in the 1850s by German physician Carl Wunderlich. According to the Los Angeles Times, Wunderlich supposedly took more than a million readings from 25,000 patients and averaged the results.
This new study isn't the first time researchers have called Wunderlich's work into question. In 1992, University of Maryland researchers concluded that the average was a somewhat lower 98.2 degrees Fahrenheit. Moreover, they found that temperatures were lowest in the morning and peaked around 6 p.m., with additional variations for different genders and races. Other studies have found that body temperature naturally cools throughout our lifetimes.
But Wunderlich wasn't necessarily wrong at the time, said Dr. Juliet Parsonnet of Stanford Medicine in an interview with the New York Times. Parsonnet, who led the recent JAMA Internal Medicine study, thinks that humans may simply run cooler than they did during Wunderlich's time. Without access to modern dental care or pharmaceutical interventions, Parsonnet said, Wunderlich's patient's may have suffered constant low-grade inflammation that raised their temperatures.
