26 General Discussion 



wonder wliether the arteriosclerosis case refers to the eighty-live-year- 

 old individual, the rather rare cancer case at that age, or whether that 

 refers to the individual of sixty-flve who is one of the 43 per cent who 

 had cancer. There may be a shift in your population. But still further, 

 your general point was that one has a wide variety of severe pathological 

 conditions existing in the senile. I think that's generally quite true, but 

 my pathologist friends tell me that, at least in the United States, there 

 comes to autopsy an individual, roughly in a proportion of about 1 in 

 100, in whom there is no pathological finding that may be termed the 

 cause of death. One finds arteries that are basically normal or show only 

 slight or at least moderate arteriosclerosis. There are no tumours, no 

 gross lung changes, no gross liver changes, the prostates are normal, 

 and so on. My question is — does that rare individual die of what I think 

 of as ageing? Does he exist at all in England? 



Cameron: I didn't say anything about the question of cancer and the 

 apparent decrease with age because the numbers were very small in the 

 older groups. My feeling is that the cancer had been filtered out in the 

 younger groups, sixty-five to seventy-five, on the assumption that 

 cancer takes so many years to develop — ^you reach an age when all the 

 cancer has developed which is likely to develop. But your explanation 

 may be better than mine. 



Lansing: I had no explanation, I just raised the question. But 

 wouldn't the same then hold for arteriosclerosis, which has a heavy toll 

 in midlife? 



Cameron: I don't feel happy about arteriosclerosis, about how long 

 it takes to produce it. But cancer, I feel, from the experimental work 

 and so on, is a thing where there is a time limit. 



Lansing: Do you ever find that rare individual, the 1 in 100 without 

 pathological findings? 



Cameron: I'd say that in 1 in 1000 one may fail to find them. 

 Lansing: I believe, Dr. Cowdry, you had a case some years ago? 

 Cowdry: I didn't have the case, but there was a lady who died in 

 Barnes Hospital aged one-hundred-and-thirteen or thereabouts who was 

 very agile and apparently in good health until just before she died. 

 There were certain police records — she was arrested for practising 

 medicine without a licence in Kansas City aged ninety-five. The 

 charges, however, were not preferred and she was let off. She was 

 thrown from a horse and kicked in the mouth when she was ninety- 

 something. There are a great many details. We have numerous cases 

 of this remarkable phenomenon — some few people growing to extreme 

 old age very gracefully and almost immune to the ravages of time. Of 

 course, we have the opposite also, of the prematurely aged person, and 

 I think that there is undoubtedly a hereditary factor. There is also a 

 very consequential thing, the environment of our tissue fluids as well as 

 the environment that is about us and that we breathe. The question of 

 ageing is complicated. I think it would be very nice if studies could now 

 be made using radioactive isotopes, to discover the rate of turnover of 

 these substances with age. It should be possible to secure quantitative 

 data on the ageing of a considerable number of tissues without too 



