Medical Dictionary Definitions A-Z List
Medical Dictionary Definitions A - Z - «A»:
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Affect
Affect: The emotional tone a person expresses. A person's affect may be appropriate or inappropriate to the situation. One type of inappropriate affect is a flat affect or blunted affect, a common feature of schizophrenia....
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Affective disorder, seasonal (SAD)
Affective disorder, seasonal (SAD): Depression that tends to occur (and recur) as the days grow shorter in the fall and winter. It is believed that affected persons react adversely to the decreasing amounts of light and the colder temperatures as the fall and winter progress.
Seasonal affective d...
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Afferent
Afferent: Carrying toward. A vein is an afferent vessel since it carries blood toward from the heart. An afferent nerve carries impulses toward the central nervous system. The opposite of afferent is efferent....
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Afferent nerve
Afferent nerve: A nerve that carries impulses toward the central nervous system (CNS). The opposite of an afferent nerve is an efferent nerve that carries impulses away from the CNS....
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Afferent vessel
Afferent vessel: A vessel that carries blood toward the heart. A vein or venule....
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Affinity
Affinity: In immunology, the strength of binding interaction between antigen and antibody molecules....
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AFIP
AFIP: The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology....
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Aflatoxin
Aflatoxin: A toxin produced by mold that can damage the liver and may lead to liver cancer. Aflatoxins cause cancer in some animals.
The fungi that produce aflatoxin grow on crops such as peanuts (especially) and wheat, corn, beans and rice. Aflatoxin is a problem particularly in undeveloped and dev...
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AFO (ankle-foot orthosis)
AFO (ankle-foot orthosis) : Ankle-foot orthosis....
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AFP (alpha-fetoprotein)
AFP (alpha-fetoprotein): AFP is a plasma protein
that is
normally produced by the fetus. It serves as the basis for some
valuable tests.
AFP is manufactured principally in the
fetus's liver and, also, in the fetal gastrointestinal (GI) tract and
the yolk sac, a structure temporarily present d...
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African American
African American: An American of black African descent. The term may also be written with a hyphen as African-American.
The term entered into usage largely starting in 1988, when the Rev. Jesse Jackson held a news conference to urge Americans to use it to refer to blacks. African American has large...
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African sleeping sickness
African sleeping sickness: Also called African trypanosomiasis, a systemic disease caused by the parasite Trypanosoma brucei that is
transmitted by the bite of the tsetse fly, a gray-brown insect about the size of
a honeybee. African trypanosomiasis is confined to tropical Africa from north of
So...
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African tapeworm
African tapeworm: The beef tapeworm (Taenia saginata),
the most common of the big tapeworms that parasitizes people, contracted from infected raw
or rare beef. Can grow to be 12-25 feet (3.6-7.5 m) long in the human intestine. ...
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African tick typhus
African tick typhus: One of the tick-borne rickettsial
diseases of the eastern hemisphere, similar to Rocky Mountain spotted fever, but less
severe, with fever, a small ulcer (tache noire) at the site of the tick bite, swollen
glands nearby (satellite lymphadenopathy), and a red raised (maculopapula...
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African trypanosomiasis
African trypanosomiasis: See: African sleeping sickness....
