title: Screening for hypothermia in the ambulatory elderly. The Maine experience.
abstract: This study investigated the prevalence of low body temperatures in 97 elderly and 20 nonelderly subjects. To the best of our knowledge, no earlier survey has been conducted with a North American population. To ensure comparability with the British National Survey performed in 1973, urine temperatures were collected as a proxy measure of core temperatures. The urine-collecting funnel was modified to minimize cooling artifact introduced by the device. Study subjects were selected from an internal medicine clinic that serves the poor, a federally subsidized housing project, and a subsidized housing project in northernmost Maine. A youthful population (mean age, 32.3 years) was chosen to provide a comparative population to elderly participants (mean age, 73.9 years). Based on the British National Survey, the expected prevalence of low body temperatures (less than 35.5 degrees C) was 10%. The present study detected no low body temperatures, and the average urine and mouth temperatures were 0.3 and 0.19 degree C warmer, respectively, than those in the British National Survey. Youthful subjects were not significantly different from elderly participants. There appears to be no evidence from this study that low early-morning basal body temperature (less than 35.5 degrees C) is a common geriatric occurrence in ambient room temperature.
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007035:Hypothermia / Q000453:epidemiology*; D008281:Maine; D008297:Male; D008722:Methods; D009055:Mouth; D013696:Temperature; D006113:United Kingdom; D014556:Urine