Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Medical vocabulary question

Hi all!

I have some questions about medical vocabulary (where’s Jill? ). I need:

1. The medical name of the ‘Mad Cow Disease’. (I know it but I can’t spell it in English, it must be something like ‘Kreutshfeld-Jacob’.)

2. The name of an examination performed in several parts of the body, especially the brain, when you get the organ kind of x-rayed, but using magnetism instead of x-rays, and you get many slides instead of just one. I thought it would be called ‘magnetic tomography’, but I can’t find the word tomography in the dictionary.

Anyway, does anyone know?

Thanks in advance.
AnnaBtG.

Well, I'm no medical expert, but far as I know, Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease or CJD is the human form of the disease. The medical term for it as applied to cows is BSE - Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy.

For question two - sounds like you might be meaning an MRI brain scan. But I know very little about that, so not sure.

Anyway, sure someone will know more specifically than this.


LabRat (/me hollers for Doc Jill <G> )

1. I believe the term for mad cow disease is Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease and it is called Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (I've heard it called the first in animals and the second in humans, but I am not sure). Basically it makes your brain all spongey and gross looking (i've seen pictures ICK it's unmistakable).

Jill can correct me if I am wrong.

2. The image of the brain you are taking about seems like Magnetic Resinance Imaging or MRI -- it uses magnitism of Hydrogen ions to image soft tissue. The tomography you are thinking of is computed tomography or CT scan (or CAT scans).

- LauraA
(biomedical engineers have to take med school classes, too . . . I've taken medical imaging classes)

How would I ever be able to spell it on my own?

I think MRI is the term I am looking for, I think I've heard it before (maybe I should check that game I used to play, Emergency Room 3).
The problem, LauraA, is that, if I got the meanings correctly, here in Greece we call MRI 'Magnetic tomography' ('Magnitiki tomografia') and CT scan 'Axial tomography' ('Axoniki tomografia'). I know the Greek terms because I've asked my father about them (he's a biologist).

Anyway, thank you both and LabRat and LauraA for your help.
AnnaBtG.

It doesn't look like I'm really needed here. LabRat and Laura have pretty much covered it all. Although I will say add (just because I can <g>) that Mad Cow Disease causes a variant type of CJD. CJD has been around longer than mad cow disease and can certainly be caused by other things besides Mad Cow, there's even a form that they believe is hereditary (that would suck).

And MRI definitely sounds like what you're looking for - they use both MRI and CT to scan the body, it really depends on what you're trying to diagnose or look at - that'll determine whether you want to do a CT or an MRI. (Just got done with my Radiology clerkship. )

Jill (who is trying to escape from the Psych ward at the moment)

PS. Just saw your 2nd post Anna, and CT is also called a CAT Scan, which is Computed Axial Tomography. That could explain where you're getting the Axial stuff from, and the confusion of terms.

Thanks, Jill.

AnnaBtG.

Oh, another question. I don't know how to pose it... let me give you an example.

A's heart is weak, and he needs a transplantation (I think I got this term right, at least). So B's heart is transplanted to him. What do you name the heart? (I found the words 'sucker', 'layer', 'scion' and 'shoot' in the dictionary, but none of them feels right... )

AnnaBtG. (wishing Greek had been chosen the official 'world language' instead of English...)

Hi,

I'm little confuse with your question.

If patient "A" is the recipient of the cardiac transplant or heart transplant, who's is weaken and in need of a transplant.
So he need a suitable donor who is patient "B"(Dead).
They call it heart or the organ.



MAF
PS
Recipient: In medicine, a recipient is someone who receives something like a blood transfusion or an organ transplant. The recipient is beholden to the donor.

Donor: The giver of a tissue or organ, for example, of blood or a kidney.

http://www.medterms.com/script/main/srchCont.asp?ArtTypeID=DICT&SRC=heart++transplant&op=MM

I'm not sure if I understand your question or not, but I will try to answer it . . .

Close, the correct term is "transplant". Very close, though.

What do you name the heart? I think I would call it a transplanted organ or donor organ or donated organ -- or I even think Maria is right that they would just call it "the heart" or "the organ". I don't think there's a term for an organ that is donated. Maybe Jill knows better .

- Laura


ps Your english is really good -- you must work really hard at it. I know the greek alphabet, and that's it -- and I need a song to remember it (alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, zeta, eta, theta, iota, kappa, lamda, mu, nu, xi, omicron, phi, rho, sigma, tau, upsilon, phi, chi, psi, omega)

George.

Or possibly Henry . . .

Ok, first of all - /me bonks Rivka on the head! Personally I tend to refer to all transplanted organs as Bob...but that's just me.

The others are pretty much correct. We don't really have a specific term for a transplanted organ. During the transplant we'd refer to the 'new' organ as the 'donor organ' or the 'donor heart' just to keep things straight. After the transplant, during follow-up, we just call it the 'heart' or the 'transplant'...i.e. "the transplant is not being rejected" or "the transplanted organ is functioning well", or substitute 'heart' in for any of those. One exception is for a bone marrow transplant...that will occasionally be called a 'graft', the new bone marrow has been 'grafted' into the recipients' marrow cavity.

Hope that helps,
Jill

Sorry for the delay - I've been out of town.

Thank you all for your help.

AnnaBtG.

P.S.: Laura, you keep complimenting me... thank you! And if you ever decide to improve your Greek, I'd be glad to help you