CEREBRAL METABOLIC DISTURBANCES IN HYPOTHYROIDISM

Abstract

HISTORICAL REVIEW THAT THERE are a variety of psychological changes seen in persons with myxedema is common medical knowledge, but there has been little study of this interesting relationship in the light of modern psychological and physiological concepts. In his original monograph, Sir William Gull¹ mentioned languor and occasional flashes of irritability in two cases of myxedema. Curiously, when this paper was republished in 1904 in a collection of his writings,² it was included in the section headed "Diseases of the Nervous System," this being the region he believed to be most affected. Although I do not think the nervous centres have undergone any discoverable anatomical change, nor is there any evidence that the intellect is materially injured, I believe the nervous power is upon the whole lessened, and hence have arisen the changes in the temper, and the attacks which have been described to me. In 1888