In his fascinating and illuminating new book entitled Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, Atul Gawande writes:
The story of ageing is the story of our parts. Consider the teeth. The hardest substance in the human body is the white enamel of the teeth. With age, it nonetheless wears away [....] and Experts say they can gauge a person's age to within five years from the examination of a single tooth - if the person has any teeth left to examine. [...] By the age of sixty, people in an industrialised country like the United States have lost, on average, a third of their teeth. After eighty-five, almost 40 percent have no teeth at all.
Even as our bones and teeth soften, the rest of our body hardens. Blood vessels, joints, the muscle and valves of the heart, and even the lungs pick up substantial deposits of calcium and turn stiff. [...]
To maintain the same volume of blood flow through our narrowed and stiffened blood vessels, the heart has to generate increased pressure. As a result, more than half of us develop hypertension by the age of sixty-five. [...]
And so on and so forth over several paragraphs. Do we really need to have these facts spelt out to us in such harrowing detail? I think we, or at least I, do.
Here is how Gawande concludes his brief survey of the ageing process:
Although the processes can be slowed - diet and physical activity can make a difference - they cannot be stopped. [...] Even our brains shrink: at the age of thirty, the brain is a three-pound organ that barely fits inside the skull; by the seventies, grey-matter loss leaves almost an inch of spare room. [...] The earliest portions to shrink are generally the frontal lobes, which govern judgement and planning, and the hippocampus, where memory is organised. As a consequence, memory and the ability to gather and weigh multiple ideas to multitask - peaks in midlife and then gradually declines. Processing speeds start decreasing well before age forty (which may be why mathematicians and physicists commonly do their best work in their youth). By age eighty-five, working memory and judgement are sufficiently impaired that 40 percent of us have textbook dementia.
Well, as Bertie Wooster almost said in another context "Mr Gawande is verging on the personal! But I would hate you to get the wrong impression of his book on the strenth of these few passages. On the contrary, it is warm-hearted, clear-sighted and above all very humane.
The story of ageing is the story of our parts. Consider the teeth. The hardest substance in the human body is the white enamel of the teeth. With age, it nonetheless wears away [....] and Experts say they can gauge a person's age to within five years from the examination of a single tooth - if the person has any teeth left to examine. [...] By the age of sixty, people in an industrialised country like the United States have lost, on average, a third of their teeth. After eighty-five, almost 40 percent have no teeth at all.
Even as our bones and teeth soften, the rest of our body hardens. Blood vessels, joints, the muscle and valves of the heart, and even the lungs pick up substantial deposits of calcium and turn stiff. [...]
To maintain the same volume of blood flow through our narrowed and stiffened blood vessels, the heart has to generate increased pressure. As a result, more than half of us develop hypertension by the age of sixty-five. [...]
And so on and so forth over several paragraphs. Do we really need to have these facts spelt out to us in such harrowing detail? I think we, or at least I, do.
Here is how Gawande concludes his brief survey of the ageing process:
Although the processes can be slowed - diet and physical activity can make a difference - they cannot be stopped. [...] Even our brains shrink: at the age of thirty, the brain is a three-pound organ that barely fits inside the skull; by the seventies, grey-matter loss leaves almost an inch of spare room. [...] The earliest portions to shrink are generally the frontal lobes, which govern judgement and planning, and the hippocampus, where memory is organised. As a consequence, memory and the ability to gather and weigh multiple ideas to multitask - peaks in midlife and then gradually declines. Processing speeds start decreasing well before age forty (which may be why mathematicians and physicists commonly do their best work in their youth). By age eighty-five, working memory and judgement are sufficiently impaired that 40 percent of us have textbook dementia.
Well, as Bertie Wooster almost said in another context "Mr Gawande is verging on the personal! But I would hate you to get the wrong impression of his book on the strenth of these few passages. On the contrary, it is warm-hearted, clear-sighted and above all very humane.
I can see that I also need to read this book - tho I do rather hold back in case it depresses me too much. You know, the drawing on of the clouds or whatever that line is ...
ReplyDeleteIt's topical for me, tho, because I've reasonably been hearing how in the west (apparently confined to here) contentment lessens as age increases. I've been thinking a lot about this and wondering if we in the west just are too spoilt so that advancing age comes as a nasty shock which can't be remedied by cash?
An interesting example (I think) about memory - our own youngest aunt towards the end of her life couldn't remember the house where they all grew up but remembered the names of all the farm horses. Might that be because, to her, they were of prime importance?
I'm not sure whether this comes under of memory loss or of cognitive decline but I notice that my command of French, never entirely reliable, has fallen back considerably in recent years. In particular, I find it increasingly difficult to distinguish between masculine and feminine nouns - and to respect the difference even when I do know it!
DeleteVery interesting remarks!
ReplyDelete