Category: Sm-St

The sense that provides information about an object’s scent, often giving clues to the palatability of food, the safety of air, and other matters. The organs of smell are made up of patches of tissue called the olfactory membranes that are each about the size of a postage stamp. These membranes are located in a pair of clefts just…

Small round blue cell tumor: a group of childhood tumors that is characterized by a similar appearance under the microscope. The appearance is that of small, round, primitive cells that stain blue with conventional staining techniques for biopsy analysis. The small round blue cell tumors include neuroblastoma, rhabdomyosarcoma, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and the Ewing’s family of tumors. Sometimes other tumor types…

The part of the digestive tract that extends from the stomach to the large intestine.

SGA infants weigh 2500 g or less at birth and are considered to have intrauterine growth retardation (IUGR), given their gestational age. By contrast, an infant may weighs 2500 g or less simply because of prematurity.

Also called microphthalmia, an abnormally small eye, a congenital malformation (birth defect) of the globe. The related term “anophthalmia” means no eye and refers to absence of the globe and ocular tissue from the orbit. Microphthalmia may involve one or both eyes. It may occur in isolation with no associated malformations or it may be part of a multiple congenital malformation syndrome as, for…

A unit of food energy. The word calorie is ordinarily used instead of the more precise, scientific term kilocalorie. A kilocalorie represents the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of a liter of water 1′ centigrade at sea level. Technically, a kilocalorie represents 1,000 true calories of energy.