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It is after the menopause in women that myxedema, the disease of complete degeneration of the thyroid, and of the physical and mental faculties, is most frequent. The thyroid of old people exhibits, in varying degrees, signs of a similar degeneration. Thyroid feeding, properly controlled, will clear up certain of the deteriorations of mind and body observable in the aged.
For example, alterations in the efficiency of the cerebral link may yield neurasthenia, mania, dementia; of the thyroid link, Graves' disease, myxedema; of the adrenal link, Addison's disease, cardiovascular disease. This introduction may serve to give the line of our argument.
Myxedema subjects show a loss of physical and mental energy which is proportional to the lack of thyroid. Deficiency in any of the organs of the kinetic chain causes alike loss of heat, loss of muscular and emotional action, of mental power, and of the power of combating infections the negative evidence thus strongly supports the positive.
Although the mother's pelvis was wide, the disposition to bear huge infants was so great as to render the woman virtually barren. Congenital asymmetry and hemihypertrophy of the body are most peculiar anomalies and must not be confounded with acromegaly or myxedema, in both of which there is similar lack of symmetric development.
Marie regards the disease as a systemic dystrophy analogous to myxedema, due to a morbid condition of the pituitary body, just as myxedema is due to disease of the thyroid. In several of the cases reported the squint and optic atrophy and the amblyopia have pointed to the pituitary body as the seat of a new growth of hypertrophy. Pershing shows a case of this nature.
But it has, besides the energizing effect, certain formative and nervous influences equally marvelous. As illustrations, there are the cases of thyroid deprivation in human beings, cretinism and myxedema, as well as those in which it is believed there occurs an excess of the thyroid secretion in the blood and tissues, the condition of hyperthyroidism.
General dropsy, elephantiasis, lipomata, myxedema, and various other affections in which there is a hypertrophic change of the connective tissues may be mistaken for general obesity; on the other hand, a fatty, pendulous abdomen may simulate the appearances of pregnancy or even of ovarian cyst.
The subthyroid will suffer an emphasis of her defect, and pass on, because of pregnancy, to the truly diseased state of myxedema, the state of dull, slow, stupid, semi-animal semi-idiocy. The pituitary type becomes more masculinized.
Some higher types may even come to speak connected sentences, and exhibit a certain mild spontaneity, though stupid and slow and abnormally deliberate, resembling the acquired form of thyroid deprivation or insufficiency, for which Ord invented the name myxedema.
The last picture of her, a water color drawing made in 1907, shows a round visaged old dame, who might be the peasant grandmother of two dozen descendants. Little patches of red over the cheek bones remind one of myxedema and indicate that toward the very end of her life her thyroid failed her as well as her pituitary.
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