Arterial Thickening in Old Age.

The pathology of arteriosclerosis has been much studied in recent years: but the clinical aspects have had little attention. A small book on diagnosis written by Parkinson in 1898 had more space devoted to examination of the arteries than Saville's " Clinical Medicine" of 1939, which has six times the number of, pages. Even Cowdry's symposium on arteriosclerosis does not say much on the clinical aspects of arterial thickening. In fact, Sydenstricker there quotes the statistics of the Life Extension Institute of America, and gives the final age group as " sixty or over." It is only in this and the following decades that the state of the arteries assumes real importance. It would seem, therefore, that there is a lack of reliable information about the arterial thickening of later life, at least on the clinical side. Apart from a note by Lansbury and Brown about the importance of calcification and the figures of Sydenstricker, there is little in recent papers which bears on this point. The present paper deals with the findings on examination of Chelsea pensioners and offers a new method of classifying arterial thickening in old persons.