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

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Both in Graves’s disease and fever there is an augmentation of the processes of oxidation. After convalescence, however, oxidation may be diminished, and this explains, as we have shown at the French Congress of Medicine in 1904,^[66] why obesity so frequently occurs after infectious diseases on the basis of degenerative changes of the thyroid, which governs oxidation; during the course of infectious disease with fever increased activity of the thyroid and loss of weight occur, and these are followed by exhaustion of thyroid activity and obesity.

The conditions of delirium and maniacal exaltation in cases of high fever are analogous to the condition of mental exaltation that may occur in Graves’s disease. According to the late Moebius,^[67] in cases of Graves’s disease there are sometimes symptoms like those of alcoholic intoxication due to the toxins of the thyroid. We believe that the mental exaltation in chloroform narcosis and alcoholic intoxication stands in relation with the action of these drugs upon the thyroid. That alcohol acts upon the thyroid has been shown by de Quervain, Hertoghe,^[68] and others. Sajous in his work on the “Internal Secretions,” urges that the thyroid is not directly excited by toxins and other poisons which produce fever, but that these toxics excite primarily the thyroid center (or better the adreno-thyroid center, for he holds that the adrenals are also governed by this center) thus increasing the secretory activity of the gland. The correctness of this view is proved by the fact that, as shown by Sawandowski,^[69] section of the basal tissues, and, therefore, between the pituitary and the bulb, prevented the production of fever, due to putrid materials, and also the influence of antipyretics, antipyrin, for instance.