Old Age and Changes Incidental to It
by George Murray Humphry (9780217306560)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: now gradually lose weight, but do not ordinarily diminish in size, as they do in atrophy from paralysis; indeed, they not unfrequently rather increase in size from the continuance of a slow process of subperiosteal ossification. To this, in part, may be attributed the sharp outlines which the figure of old persons commonly acquires, except in the case of those who become corpulent. The absorption takes place first and chiefly in the more vascular and cancellous parts, the bony plates becoming thinned and removed, and the cancelli and the canals being enlarged and filled with marrow, while the bony tissue itself becomes often, though not always, more impregnated with oily matter. Hence, although the walls of the shaft are being gradually thinned from within, the ends of the bones are first and most affected, which explains the greater liability to fractures near the joints in old persons than in the middle-aged. This change, with the proportionate liability to fracture, is especially remarkable in the trochanteric and cervical parts of the thigh-bones, the strength of whichis so much dependent upon the strength and disposition of the cancellous plates. This change takes place earlier in women than in men, which may be a consequence of the earlier cessation of active occupation in them, and the less amount of outdoor exercise they usually take, or it may be due to some natural predisposition in them, associated with a greater tendency to adipose degeneration in other parts, and evincing itself occasionally, in an exaggerated manner, in the production of osteomalacia. The greater frequency of fracture of the neck of the thigh-bone in them is to be attributed to the greater weakening which the part thus undergoes, as well as to the more near approach to a right angle which the neck...

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