Word: geriatrician
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...Howard Fillit, a geriatrician at New York City's Mount Sinai Medical Center, has conducted small-scale tests of estrogen with women who have mild to moderate Alzheimer's. Patients who did not know the month or year could recall them after just three weeks on daily doses of hormones. The women became more alert, ate and slept better, and showed improved social behavior. Fillit believes testosterone therapy may prove equally useful for male patients. Estrogen is not yet an approved therapy for Alzheimer's, but as the evidence builds, it is fast becoming one of the brightest hopes...
True, of course, but 120 borders on the unnatural. It is at the uppermost limit of what biologists believe is the maximum human life-span. Calment, says Harvard geriatrician Dr. Thomas Perls, "is the Michael Jordan of aging," genetically blessed with extraordinary physical gifts that favor survival. "The chances of you or me getting to be her age are similar to our chances of playing basketball like Jordan." Only one other person is known to have lived as long: Shigechiyo Izumi of Japan, who died in 1986 at 120 years...
From the start, it seemed like a classic case of "grandpa dumping." Some stressed-out family member, experts conjectured, had suddenly broken under the pressure of caring for a confused and ailing spouse or parent. "It's shocking and terrible," says University of Chicago geriatrician Dr. Christine Cassel, "but it doesn't surprise me at all. The families of Alzheimer's patients sometimes just give up in despair." Such families have been known to drop their elderly charges off at hospital emergency rooms and then disappear. "It happens here probably once a month," says University of Chicago emergency- room physician...
...prestigious panel of doctors, lawyers, theologians and others since it started work three years ago, concludes that a competent patient, one who is able to understand treatment choices and their consequences, has the all-but-absolute right to decide his own fate. Declares Dr. Joanne Lynn, a geriatrician and principal author of the report: "An adult person of sound mind has authority over his own body." When a person is incompetent, says the report, a surrogate, usually a family member, should be named to make treatment decisions. The commission urges courts and legislatures for the most part to stay away...
...When the geriatricians have succeeded in adding another age to Shakespeare's seven, what will all the porcelain teeth chatter about? The same old things, answers thirtyish Author Spark in this novel of arthritis and ague. None of her major characters will see 70 again, but since no sin has yet proved deadly, the reasoning of the ancients seems to run. there is reason to hope that wrongdoing may even be healthful. So they tyrannize each other, gloat over signs of decrepitude in contemporaries, stir the ashes and the urns of old loves with gossip. One septuagenarian lady runs...