Does anyone know of any large population-based dataset that recorded human body temperature?
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I added "human" to your question, unless you were looking for beavers.– philshemCommented Oct 12, 2016 at 14:14
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Thank you! Yes, interested in humans, not beavers. And yes, the Mackowiak's study seems one of the very few who measured the temperature, but based it on a small sample.– Myroslava ProtsivCommented Oct 13, 2016 at 22:16
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I'm kind of surprised there isn't a larger open data set.– philshemCommented Oct 14, 2016 at 17:30
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1 Answer
It's not a large dataset, but
What's Normal? -- Temperature, Gender, and Heart Rate
The data were derived from an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association entitled "A Critical Appraisal of 98.6 Degrees F, the Upper Limit of the Normal Body Temperature, and Other Legacies of Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich" (Mackowiak, Wasserman, and Levine 1992). The authors display a histogram of 148 subjects' normal temperatures taken at several different times during two consecutive days, resulting in 700 total readings. The relative frequency histogram is also broken down by gender (122 males and 26 females). I derived the dataset presented here by working backwards from this histogram. I tried as closely as possible to recreate the original data, but with a reduction in sample size to 130 total readings. Relatively more of the female subjects' readings have been represented, so that the number of male and female readings would be equal. This equality helps to keep introductory statistics students from getting sidetracked by weighting issues. The means for both men and women (98.1 and 98.4) are the same as those reported in the article, and the distributions are as close as possible to the original. I also derived heart rates from the regression statistics given in the article, so that equivalent results can be obtained from this dataset.
Columns
1 - 5 Body temperature (degrees Fahrenheit)
9 Gender (1 = male, 2 = female)
14 - 15 Heart rate (beats per minute)
Data sample (link)
96.3 1 70
96.7 1 71
96.9 1 74
97.0 1 80