Читать книгу Old Age Deferred. The causes of old age and its postponement by hygienic and therapeutic measures онлайн

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This is shown by the fact that, after the fortieth or forty-fifth year, the thyroid shows an increased amount of connective tissue, and thus cannot be so active as a thyroid with more secreting elements and less connective tissue.

We have thus reasons to suppose that the persons above mentioned, who only exhibit some but not all of the symptoms of old age, symptoms which are also found as typical in myxœdema, are suffering from a partial myxœdema or hypothyroidia. And it does not necessarily follow that in all such cases the processes of nutrition will be diminished, as is the rule in typical cases of myxœdema.

The resemblance between senility and myxœdema was first pointed out in 1890 by Sir Victor Horsley, one of the foremost authors on myxœdema, and afterward by Vermehren,^[4] Ewald,^[5] of Berlin, and the author. Horsley ascribed old age to degeneration of the thyroid gland, and we have shown (in a communication to the Paris Biological Society, presented by Dr. Gley, Professor of Physiology at the University of Paris, December 4, 1904) that, besides the thyroid, there are also different other ductless glands whose degeneration produces old age. These are the sexual glands, the pituitary body, and the adrenals.