Last Updated Jan 19th, 2020 at 7:28 pm

According to a new study from Stanford University, the average human body temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit may no longer be accurate.

Researchers have learned that although German physician Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich's analysis of one million temperatures from 25,000 patients conducted 150 years ago was correct, the human body has changed over the course of history.

The findings indicate that today's average body temperature is roughly one degree lower, at 97.5 degrees Fahrenheit.

Dr. Julie Parsonnet, who specializes in infectious diseases at Stanford, decided to test her team's hypothesis that today's body temperature is lower than what Wunderlich concluded.

The team analyzed 677,423 temperatures collected from 189,338 individuals over the past 157 years.

They discovered that temperatures taken during the early Civil War era were higher than ones taken in the 1970s and that the 1970s measurements were higher than those collected in the 2000s.

Parsonnet said she was impressed with both "the magnitude of the change and that temperature has continued to decline at the same rate."