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

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Degenerative changes of the pituitary body may also be inherited. Thus Bonardi and Schwoner and others also showed cases of acromegaly of hereditary origin.

Diabetes is, as we have said, a disease of the ductless glands, and we have especially emphasized, on previous occasions, how frequently, if not invariably, diabetes originates through heredity. We have also shown in a communication published in the Practitioner, of London, in October, 1903, that the children of diabetic persons have an inherited tendency to alimentary glycosuria, which occurs very frequently among them.

Myxœdematous persons, as a rule, have children displaying symptoms of congenital myxœdema, and cretins have cretinous children. The very interesting case has been published of a woman who, until the age of 40, had two normal children. She then acquired a goiter, and the child that was born later was a cretin with a goiter (Lanz).

Parents suffering from diseases in which the thyroid has degenerated, such as chronic tuberculosis, malaria, syphilis, and other cachectic diseases, have children whose growth is slow, and who remain backward physically and mentally. Such children easily acquire any infectious disease. Tuberculosis, as we have shown at the International Congress on Tuberculosis in Paris, in 1905, is remarkably frequent among them. We can easily appreciate the fact, if we realize that the children of such parents in whom the thyroid has degenerated through disease are born usually with a congenital atrophy of the thyroid gland, which has been proved by Gamier and Perrando. These children have inherited from their forefathers the bad qualities of their thyroid, and this will also explain why such children, when fully grown up, will not remain, as a rule, for so long a time as youthful looking as other persons who have inherited healthy thyroids; they early become aged-looking and, also, as a rule, their lives are shortened owing to their tendency to contract easily all kinds of infections.