CLIMATERIC, AGE. — Attribution given by the ancients to certain periods of life, recurring at fixed intervals (every seven or nine years); critical points of particular difficulty, in which the organism, as if renewing itself, undergoes substantial changes in its own constitution, dangerous ruptures of equilibrium, hence a greater frequency of illness and mortality.
The doctrine dates back to Pythagoras; the ancients, adhering to an astrological concept, based its determinism on the earth's revolution and the recurrence of leap years. Modern constitutional medicine has revived these concepts in a new form, demonstrating how, in the course of an individual's life, there truly exist particular periods in which the organism undergoes radical changes linked to shifts in endocrine constitution and the search for new equilibria, presenting a particular fragility and susceptibility to illness. This occurs most clearly at two nodal points in the journey of life: the beginning of sexual life (v. Puberty) and the end, especially manifest in women (menopause). In the latter, the climacteric assumes special importance due to the cessation of ovarian follicular function and the substantial change in endocrine equilibrium, which attempts to shift toward a compensatory hyperfunction of the thyroid, pituitary, and adrenal glands, while characteristic changes appear in external forms (tendency toward adiposity and masculinization), nervous and psychic changes (paresthesias, hypercatabolism, vasomotor imbalances, headaches, modifications in affective tone with a tendency toward anxious melancholy). The two aforementioned climacteric ages of life—the puberty in both sexes, and menopause in women (in men, the climacteric point marking the transition from virile age to old age is not so clear)—truly represent difficult epochs of particular predisposition to illness and mortality. Certain forms of anemia, tuberculosis, tumors (uterine and breast cancer in women, prostate cancer in men), and some psychoses (schizophrenia, manic and melancholic forms) show a particular predilection for such climacteric ages.