CLIMATERIC AGES. — A designation 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 though renewing itself, underwent substantial changes in its constitution and dangerous disturbances of equilibrium, resulting in a greater frequency of illness and mortality.
The doctrine goes back to Pythagoras; the ancients, adhering to an astrological concept, based its determinism on the revolution of the earth 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 really exist particular periods in which the organism undergoes radical changes linked to shifts in the endocrine constitution and the search for new equilibria, displaying particular fragility and susceptibility to illness. This occurs most clearly at two nodal points in the course of life: the beginning of sexual life (v. PUERTA) and its end, manifested especially in women (menopause). In the latter, the climacteric assumes special importance because of the extinction of ovarian follicular function and the substantial alteration of the endocrine equilibrium, which tends to shift toward a compensatory hyperfunction of the thyroid, pituitary, and adrenal glands, while characteristic changes appear in the external forms (a tendency toward adiposity and masculinization), as well as in the nervous and psychic spheres (paresthesias, heightened sensitivity, vasomotor disturbances, headaches, and modifications in affective tone with an easy tendency toward states of anxious melancholy). The two aforementioned climacteric ages of life—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 sharply defined)—truly represent difficult periods of particular predisposition to illness and mortality. Certain forms of anemia, tuberculosis, tumors (cancer of the uterus and breast in women, of the prostate in men), and certain psychoses (schizophrenia, manic and melancholic forms) show a particular predilection for such climacteric ages.