The Relationship Between Organic Brain Disease and Physical Status

Abstract

Numerous studies in the medical literature support a direct relationship in the elderly between poor physical status and organic brain disease with psychiatric impairment. Simon (1968) reported that four-fifths of 534 geriatric patients hospitalized primarily for chronic brain syndrome and senile brain disease also suffered physical impairments severe enough to interfere with their daily functions. In his series the most common physical illnesses, in descending order of frequency, were malnutrition, congestive heart failure, stroke, hypertension, serious respiratory infection, peripheral neuritis often associated with alcoholism, and cancer. Kay and Roth (1955) found 82 percent of the severely ill medical patients they studied in old age homes had moderate or severe brain syndromes. Hader, Schulman, and Faigman (1965) uncovered physical illness in 90 percent of the mentally ill patients they examined in a geriatric mental hygiene clinic.

“The mind is so intimately dependent upon the condition and relation of the organs of the body that if any means can ever be found to render man wiser and more ingenious than hitherto, I believe that it is in Medicine they must be sought for.”

René Descartes