Climacteric Age

CLIMACTERIC, AGE. — Attribution given by the ancients to certain periods of life, recurring at fixed times (every seven or nine years); critical points of particular difficulty, in which the organism, almost renewing itself, underwent substantial changes in its constitution, dangerous ruptures of equilibrium, whence 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 earth's revolution and the recurrence of leap years. Modern constitutionalist medicine has revived such concepts in a new form, demonstrating how there really exist in the course of an individual's life particular periods in which the organism undergoes radical changes linked to shifts in the endocrine constitution and to the search for new equilibria, presenting a particular fragility and susceptibility to illness. This occurs more clearly at two nodal points in the course of life: the beginning of sexual life (v. PUBERTY) and the end, manifest in particular in women (menopause). In the latter, the climacteric takes on special importance, because of the extinction of ovarian follicular function and the substantial change in the endocrine equilibrium, which attempts to shift toward a compensatory hyperfunction of the thyroid, the pituitary, and the adrenals, while characteristic changes appear in the external forms (tendency to adiposity and masculinization), nervous and psychic changes (paresthesias, hyperesthesia, vasomotor imbalances, headaches, alterations of affective tone with an easy tendency to 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 passage from the virile age to old age is not so clear-cut), truly represent difficult epochs 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), certain psychoses (schizophrenia, manic and melancholic forms) show a particular predilection for such climacteric ages.

Giuseppe de Ninno