Syndrome
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Originally from medicine, the term syndrome is the combination and clustering of a number of symptoms into a fixed pattern. It is now commonly used in the public discourse to reflect any familiair course of events in politics or sociology.
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2 Other syndromes 3 AIDS, a case study 4 See also 5 External links |
Eponymous syndromes
A "syndrome" is typically recognised and described (often by one or more individual doctors) before a satisfactory pathophysiological explanation can be found. This is probably the best reason why many syndromes bear the names of the doctors who originally reported the constellation of symptoms. Examples are:
Other syndromes
Otherwise, disease features or presumed causes, as well as references to geography, history or poetry, can lend their names to syndromes:
- Atopic syndrome
- Syndrome of inappropriate ADH secretion (SIADH);
- Sick building syndrome;
- Jerusalem syndrome;
- Stendhal syndrome.
AIDS, a case study
A recent case study is Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), so named as most syndromal immune deficiencies are either inborn or secondary to hematological disease. AIDS was originally termed "Gay Related Immune Disease" (or GRID), a name which was revised as the disease turned out to equally affect heterosexuals. Only several years after the recognition of AIDS, HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) was described, explaining the hitherto unexplained "syndrome".
SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) is an even more recent example of a syndrome that was later explained with the identification of a causative coronavirus.
See also
External links
- Whonamedit.com - a repository of medical eponyms