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...

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