General Medical Terms

An abbreviation for a chemotherapy combination used to treat childhood ovarian and testicular germ cell cancers that have spread.

A staging system for prostate cancer that uses ABCD.

An East Indian plant that is a member of the ginger family and is used as a spice and food color.

A rare form of childhood leukemia in which cancer cells often spread into tissues such as the skin, lung, and intestines.

A tree native to West Africa.

A type of nevus (mole) found at the junction (border) between the epidermis (outer) and the dermis (inner) layers of the skin.

Juvenile pilocytic astrocytoma, most often diagnosed in children, forms from star shaped supportive brain cells and typically grows slowly with well defined borders.

A combination of the drugs ritonavir and lopinavir.

A glycosaminoglycan (a type of polysaccharide) found in cartilage and in the cornea of the eye.

A natural substance that stimulates the growth of epithelial cells in the skin and in the lining of the mouth, stomach, and intestines.

This dome shaped skin growth appears within weeks and often resolves untreated, yet it can be nearly indistinguishable from squamous cell carcinoma.

One of a pair of organs in the abdomen.

A kilogram is the standard metric unit of body weight in medicine, central to accurate weight based drug dosing calculations.

A substance that is used to treat rheumatoid arthritis, and is being studied in the treatment of cancer.

A kinase is an enzyme that adds a phosphate group to another molecule, a reaction central to cell signaling, metabolism, and growth.

A substance that causes blood stem cells (cells from which other types of cells develop) to change into different types of blood cells and increases the number and actions of these cells in the blood.

A bacterium that frequently causes lung, urinary tract, intestinal, and wound infections.

An inherited disorder in which there is a lower-than-normal number of neutrophils (a type of white blood cell that is important in fighting infections).

A kretek is a clove-flavored cigarette that combines tobacco with ground cloves and other additives during manufacturing.

A type of herpesvirus that may cause Kaposi sarcoma (a rare cancer that can cause skin lesions) and a type of lymphoma (cancer that begins in the lymph system), especially in patients who have a…