Medicine: Younger Oldsters?

Because the ravages of infectious diseases have been so drastically reduced in recent years by modern medicine, the average middle-aged U.S. citizen today is physiologically at least four years "younger" than his grandfather was at the same age. So said Dr. Hardin Jones last week in a report to the Western Gerontological Society in Los Angeles. By analyzing disease and mortality tables, Dr. Jones, University of California physiologist, has developed a new theory based on the proposition that infectious diseases and injuries cause successive impairment of the body's metabolic mechanisms. Conversely, the fewer diseases and injuries a person suffers, the less he ages.

Each instance of disease—especially in childhood—does a certain amount of damage to the body's overall metabolic efficiency, Dr. Jones theorizes, and succeeding bouts with disease further impair the vigor and organization of body function. The dramatic decline of such diseases as smallpox, tuberculosis and syphilis means less impairment of the body's total functional capacity. From elaborate disease statistics and death rates, Dr. Jones concludes, therefore, that the 45-year-olds of 1956 should be equated with the 40-year-olds of 1900.

Since the body is metabolically younger, it can go on longer before processes break down and degenerative diseases—arteriosclerosis, heart disease, cancer, etc.— take over. Not only is the life span lengthened, but the body is actually healthier at a given age than 50 years ago. Dr. Jones' prognosis: as the conquest of disease goes on, man may expect to creep ever closer to his theoretical disease-free metabolic life expectancy (estimated by some to be a ripe old 120 years).