United States or Lithuania ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
At this time of life the thyroid is disturbed, and often, especially if weight is added, it is not secreting sufficiently. Whether, with the polyglandular disturbance of the menopause the suprarenals are excited and hypersecreting, or whether they are simply relatively secreting more vasopressor substance than is combated by the vasodilator substance from the thyroid, cannot be determined.
In hyperthyroidism at first the blood pressure may be lowered on account of the increased physiologic secretion of the thyroid gland. Later the blood pressure may be raised by stimulation of the suprarenals, or it may become raised from the irritated and stimulated heart becoming hypertrophied.
Furthermore, the reason that many infections are followed later by arterio- sclerosis may be the fact that the suprarenals have been stimulated to hypertrophy and hypersecrete. Many persons in middle life, and especially women at the time of the menopause, show hypertension without arterial or kidney reason.
Besides the small amount of blood pressure-raising substance secreted by the hypophysis cerebri. it has not been shown that any other gland of the body furnishes vasopressor substance except the suprarenals. Atropin: When there is great cardiac weakness, atropin may be used to advantage. The dose is from 1/200 to 1/150 grain hypodermically, not repeated in many hours.
Not only the sex glands, but the liver, suprarenals, thyroid the whole body in fact became adjusted to the male type. He had long before birth what we call a male sex complex. Complex it is, but it is, nevertheless, easy enough to imagine its nature for illustrative purposes.
Very low blood pressure after exertion, after severe physical exercise, or after competitive athletic tests shows that the heart cannot sustain such strains and should not be again subjected to them. In severe mental and physical strains the suprarenals may be inhibited in their activities, and a hypotension, more or less prolonged, may result. Jour. Med.
Patients with this trouble and with hypertension, and without nephritis, probably have an increased secretion from the suprarenals. We may sum up the prognosis in hypertension as follows: Hypertension alone is not of unfavorable omen; if it is not readily reduced by ordinary means, it is more serious. If associated with kidney, heart or liver defect, it is most serious.
Therefore a subsecretion of the thyroid predisposes to arteriosclerosis, and increased secretion of the suprarenals predisposes to arteriosclerosis, the thyroid furnishing vasodilator substance and the suprarenals vasopressor substance to the blood. Furthermore. if these secretions are abnormal, protein metabolism is more or less disturbed.
It should be remembered that sex in higher mammals is of the whole body, and depends upon all the secretions. Hence an accident to one of the other glands may upset the balance as well as one to the sex glands themselves. For example, 15% of Neugebauer's cases of female tubular partial hermaphroditism had abnormal growths in the suprarenals.
"There must be," he says, "some gross change in those parts of the endocritic system, especially apart from the genital glands, which normally produce masculinity potentiality that appears to be concentrated in the suprarenals, the pituitary and probably in the pineal." What, then, do we mean by "male" and "female" in man? Yet an operation proved that the sex glands themselves were male.
Word Of The Day