Word: chronicic
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Medical advances are already having a pronounced effect on the seniors' quality of life. A yearly federal survey of 20,000 people 65 and older showed a steady decrease through the 1980s in chronic disabilities of all kinds--with the most dramatic reductions in the 85-plus segment. "It is evolutionary, not revolutionary," says Kenneth Manton, a demographer at Duke University in North Carolina. Nonetheless, it is a welcome relief for the aging. "Life is a lot better now for older people than it was just 20 years ago," says Dr. Harold Karpman, a Beverly Hills, California, cardiologist...
...known as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which torments its victims with clouds of horrific anxieties and forces them, like primitive priests propitiating unknown gods, to indulge in senseless and repetitive rituals. Not long ago, this disease--along with most other so-called mental illnesses--was considered to be a chronic, untreatable condition, a psychological crippler whose roots lay hidden deep within the brain's mysterious recesses...
...drugs have also drastically altered the outlook for panic disorder, a chronic illness characterized by recurrent panic attacks and a lifetime of fear in between. The symptoms of an attack--among them palpitations, breathlessness, sweating, dizziness, tingling sensations, hot flashes or chills, as well as a sense of impending doom--seem so dire and life-threatening that patients frequently turn up in emergency rooms convinced they are having a heart attack or going insane. Thirty percent of the 2.4 million Americans with panic disorder go on to develop agoraphobia, the fear of leaving home lest they succumb to panic...
Obsessive-compulsive disorder, which affects 1% to 3% of Americans, was until recently considered a chronic, untreatable condition. Victims more ordinary than Lady Macbeth and Howard Hughes are haunted by persistent, intrusive thoughts or worries (obsessions), and may spend countless hours performing repetitive rituals (compulsions) such as hand washing, counting, hoarding old clothes, arranging napkins in a meaningless symmetry or checking a hundred times to make sure the electric coffeemaker is turned off. Themes of dirt, contamination or germs rule their thoughts, and other common obsessions center on horrific or violent images, a need for symmetry or exactness...
...CHRONIC FATIGUE...