Medical terms A–Z

Pain and nothing more: an ending reporting a symptom the person feels, with no claim about what is causing it.

A cutting out: the ending telling a reader that an operation removed something rather than merely opened or inspected it.

Whatever the root names, this ending places it in the bloodstream or describes the state of the blood itself.

The commonest ending in the whole vocabulary, and the one most often misread as proof that an infection is present.

Tissue gone soft where it should be firm, a change visible on scans and under the microscope alike.

An ending that records size and nothing else: the organ named in front of it is bigger than it should be.

The branch of knowledge, not the person: one ending names the field and a slightly longer one names its practitioner.

An abnormal state or an ongoing process, and the ending most often mistaken for a second word meaning inflammation.

A syllable apart from removal and from a lasting opening, this ending means only that a structure was cut into.

Disease of a named part, used when the process is known to be wrong but not known to be anything more specific.

Surgery that rebuilds rather than removes, marking an operation whose whole purpose is shape and working function.

A suffix from the surgeon's vocabulary: the structure named in front of it has been stitched back together with sutures.

An ending that reports texture, not cause: the tissue named in front of it has become abnormally firm or scarred.

Looking inside with an instrument, an act named separately from the instrument that does it and from any image recorded.

The ending that reports a passage has been squeezed tighter, whether by scar, swelling, a growth or thickened valve leaflets.

A type of monoclonal antibody used in cancer detection or therapy.

A substance being studied in the treatment of cancer.

AAP most often abbreviates alanine aminopeptidase, a kidney tubular enzyme measured in urine, though the identical letters separately denote a well known pediatric professional organization.

A staging system for prostate cancer that uses ABCD.

Clinicians divide it into four quadrants or nine regions, because where pain sits narrows down which organ is speaking.