The following are health and medical definitions of terms that appear in the Apgar Score article. Anesthesiologist: A physician or, less often, a dentist who is specialized in the practice of anesthesiology, the branch of medicine involving the use of drugs or other agents that cause insensibility to pain.
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Apgar: Abbreviation for the Apgar score , a practical method of evaluating the physical condition of a newborn infant shortly after delivery. The Apgar score is a number arrived at by scoring the heart rate, respiratory effort, muscle tone, skin color, and response to a catheter in the nostril. Each of these objective signs can receive 0, 1, or 2 points.
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Apgar score : A practical method of evaluating the physical condition of a newborn infant shortly after delivery. The Apgar score is a number arrived at by scoring the heart rate, respiratory effort, muscle tone, skin color, and response to a catheter in the nostril. Each of these objective signs can receive 0, 1, or 2 points.
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Attention: The ability to focus selectively on a selected stimulus, sustaining that focus and shifting it at will. The ability to concentrate.
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Catheter: A thin, flexible tube . For example, a catheter placed in a vein provides a pathway for giving drugs, nutrients, fluids, or blood products. Samples of blood can also be withdrawn through the catheter.
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Condition: The term "condition" has a number of biomedical meanings including the following: - An unhealthy state, such as in "this is a progressive condition."
- A state of fitness, such as "getting into condition."
- Something that is essential to the occurrence of something else; essentially a "precondition."
- As a verb: to cause a change in something so that a response that was previously associated with a certain stimulus becomes associated with another stimulus; to condition a person, as in behavioral conditioning.
Disease: Illness or sickness often characterized by typical patient problems (symptoms) and physical findings (signs). Disruption sequence: The events that occur when a fetus that is developing normally is subjected to a destructive agent such as the rubella (German measles) virus.
Event: A set of outcomes. Cardiovascular events might include a heart attack and gastrointestinal events a GI bleed. The use of the term "event" in medicine comes from probability theory.
Heart: The muscle that pumps blood received from veins into arteries throughout the body. It is positioned in the chest behind the sternum (breastbone; in front of the trachea, esophagus, and aorta; and above the diaphragm muscle that separates the chest and abdominal cavities. The normal heart is about the size of a closed fist, and weighs about 10.5 ounces. It is cone-shaped, with the point of the cone pointing down to the left. Two-thirds of the heart lies in the left side of the chest with the balance in the right chest.
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Infant: A child up to 2 years (24 months) of age.
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Morbidity: Illness, disease.
Mortality: A fatal outcome or, in one word, death. The word "mortality" is derived from "mortal" which came from the Latin "mors" (death). The opposite of mortality is, of course, immortality. Mortality is also quite distinct from morbidity (illness).
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Muscle: Muscle is the tissue of the body which primarily functions as a source of power. There are three types of muscle in the body. Muscle which is responsible for moving extremities and external areas of the body is called "skeletal muscle." Heart muscle is called "cardiac muscle." Muscle that is in the walls of arteries and bowel is called "smooth muscle."
Nostril: One of the openings in the nose that allows air to flow in and out of the nasal cavities. The word nostril comes from the Old English nosu, nose + thyrel, hole = the nose hole.
Objective: In a microscope, the objective (also called the objective lens) is the lens nearest to the object being examined whereas the lens closest to the eye is termed the ocular (the eyepiece).
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Respiratory: Having to do with respiration, the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. From the Latin re- (again) + spirare (to breathe) = to breathe again.
Resuscitation: The procedure of restoring to life, as in cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).
Skin: The skin is the body's outer covering. It protects us against heat and light, injury, and infection. It regulates body temperature and stores water, fat, and vitamin D. Weighing about 6 pounds, the skin is the body's largest organ. It is made up of two main layers; the outer epidermis and the inner dermis.
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Skin color: The color of skin which is complexly determined. Skin color depends on many factors including reddening caused by inflammation , the hemoglobin level in the blood, and the darkening caused by increased deposition of the pigment melanin . Melanin itself is a polymer that comes in two types -- a red-yellow form known as pheomelanin and a black-brown form known as eumelanin.
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