…I’ve heard it could be genetics…
It was nine years ago, the significance of which will shortly be revealed. I was attending on the medicine ward service. Our team—myself, a resident and two interns—was on-call every fourth night. If we were lucky, we would manage to squeeze in a few hours of sleep between admissions and pages from the various wards.
At morning report, the interns would present the cases and I would offer comments and a critique. After that, we’d go down to radiology to review any x-rays that accompanied our cases and then we’d go up to the wards to visit the patients. From an academic medical point of view, there were no particularly rare or challenging cases that day, but there was one patient who I could never forgot: Mr. Johnson.
Mr. Johnson was 103 years old, blind and stiff from arthritis, but entirely alert. Mr. Johnson did not have Alzheimer’s. Instead, he was admitted for treatment of a community acquired pneumonia.
When I went to the bedside I felt obliged to draw on my experiences to say something educational both for the housestaff and for the patient, but as we entered Mr. Johnson’s room I was drawing a blank. In the course of this clinical rotation, we’d pretty much discussed pneumonia to the limits of my knowledge. The interns and resident had taken excellent care of Mr. Johnson. He was getting the correct antibiotics and a whiff of oxygen through some nasal prongs. The TV was on, but I could tell he couldn’t see it through his clouded eyes.
“Good morning Mr. Johnson,” I said and I shook his hand. “I’m Doctor Eshleman—one of the doctors who’s taking care of you in the hospital.”
“Hello,” said Mr. Johnson.
“Mr. Johnson, we don’t get many patients as old as you. In fact, I think you’re the oldest patient I’ve ever had. Can I ask you a few questions?”
“Sure.”
“OK, how are you feeling?”
“I’m feeling pretty good.”
“Did you ever smoke cigarettes?”
“Yeah, I smoked a bit when I was younger.”
“Did you ever drink alcohol?”
“Yeah, I like a drink now and then.”
“Do you eat meat?”
“Of course.”
“Can I ask who your favorite US President was?”
“Coolidge.”
“Coolidge? OK, do you follow baseball?”
“Sometimes.”
“So, who’s your favorite team of all time,” I asked, expecting him to name one of the Yankees teams of the 20s.
“I like the Mets.”
“Hmm. OK. So, not many people live as long as you have. Why do you think that is?”
Mr. Johnson thought for a few seconds and then answered, “well, I’m not sure, but I heard it could be genetics…”
I thought of Mr. Johnson this morning when I surfed across the following item on YAHOO News:
LOS ANGELES - George Johnson, considered California’s oldest living person at 112 and the state’s last surviving World War I veteran, had experts shaking their heads over his junk food diet.
“He had terrible bad habits. He had a diet largely of sausages and waffles,” Dr. L. Stephen Coles, founder of the Gerontology Research Group at the University of California, Los Angeles, said Friday.
The 5-foot-7, 140-pound Johnson died of pneumonia Wednesday at his Richmond home in Northern California.
“A lot of people think or imagine that your good habits and bad habits contribute to your longevity,” Coles said. “But we often find it is in the genes rather than lifestyle.”
…Coles participated in an autopsy Thursday that was designed to study Johnson’s health.
“All of his organs were extremely youthful. They could have been the organs of someone who was 50 or 60, not 112. Clearly his genes had some secrets,” Coles said.
“Everything in his body that we looked at was clean as a whistle, except for his lungs with the pneumonia,” Coles said. “He had no heart disease, he had no cancer, no diabetes and no Alzheimer’s.
“This is a mysterious case that someone could be so healthy from a pathology point of view and that there is no obvious cause of death.”
The family was in favor of an autopsy. Relatives said Johnson wanted them to allow it if it would help science.
This must be the same Mr. Johnson I had as a patient. The dates are right, the blindness is right, and Richmond, California, is only a few miles from the hospital where I was attending.
Rest in peace, Mr. Johnson. May we someday learn your secret.
Technorati Tags: genetics, longevity, environment, diet, smoking, blindness, George Johnson
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September 21st, 2006 at 10:32 am
My grandfather, a very difficult, complicated and fabulously interesting man, who was a genius composer, probably had what we now call bi-polar disorder. In the early 20’s he was given cocaine for his insomnia and his incredible depression. Although he didn’t trust doctors, he did try just about anything that they would give him to help his symptoms.
He lived until 79 years. During this entire time he put his family through hell…having affairs of the heart all while telling his wife and children (from their youth well into their middle age) he would kill himself if his lovers left him. We can now assume that this behavior was from an imbalance of chemicals in his brain.
My mother, Aunt and Uncle (all sibblings) and my brothers and myself have all at one point in our lives had some of the very same symptoms that he experienced…insomnia, great depression in some of us, difficulty in communication, very high highs - you name it, we got it.
I think ‘genes’ certainly have played quite a part in our chemical makeup. Thank goodness for research and the perseverance of doctors in their quest to figure out what makes us tick and their continuing interest in the physical as well as the mental parts of us humans.