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

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As is well known, a condition of hyperactivity of the thyroid may be followed by its exhaustion, and thus Graves’s disease may often be followed by myxœdema, i.e., athyroidia. In the same way the hyperactivity of the thyroid gland in infectious diseases may also be followed by its exhaustion and a myxœdematous condition. Even complete myxœdema most frequently appears after a previous infectious disease—a fact recognized by the earliest English authors on this disease. Accordingly, it is not surprising if an infectious disease like trypanosomiasis is followed by a condition like sleeping sickness, which, as we have shown at the German Congress for Internal Medicine in 1905, presents all the clinical symptoms of, and identical anatomico-pathological alterations of the central nervous system noted in, myxœdema. On the other hand, trypanosomiasis presents all the typical symptoms of Graves’s disease. In syphilis also, after the fever with eruptions in the secondary stage, in which we not infrequently see, especially in women, a swelling of the thyroid, we find in the tertiary stage many symptoms of a condition of myxœdema or hypothyroidia, and with the iodine treatment we add to the blood the main element of the thyroid gland. Iodine is also especially active, if not given in too large doses, in exciting thyroid activity, and sometimes it even provokes Graves’s disease.