Cosnautas - Medical acronyms dictionary | Consult the most complete glossary of medical abbreviations in Spanish.

Overview

As far as I am aware, this Repertorio de siglas, acrónimos, abreviaturas y símbolos is the most comprehensive collection of Spanish medical abbreviations published to date. It has in excess of 37,300 entries and 113,150 meanings. It is designed to lend a helping hand to people who have to unravel abbreviations of all sorts in Spanish texts, and particularly for medical translators who have Spanish as their source language.

It should not be looked upon as a prescriptive resource that imposes a correct way to abbreviate a medical term in Spanish. The fact, for example, that the repertoire glosses IE as incontinencia de esfuerzo does not mean that the expression should be abbreviated this way. Indeed, the very nature of this repertoire is such that it contains clearly incorrect abbreviations, such as CF (citoféresis), grs. (gramos), m (minuto) and T (tungsteno). However, these abbreviations are used in practice and translators are likely to find them in their source text.

Inclusion and exclusion criteria

I have included any initialism, acronym, contraction or symbol found in Spanish medical texts, but I have excluded three major groups of abbreviations:

a) Initialisms and acronyms used in clinical trial titles (e.g., CATS, PACT, TIPE). Not only have they been compiled by Tsung O. Cheng in exhaustive lists, but they are also easy to locate in online clinical trial databases.

b) English initialisms, except those in general use in Spanish texts, such as ADSL, ATP, REM and TSH. If I had been less strict with this criterion, the repertoire would have outgrown itself - big dictionaries of international medical abbreviations can easily have upwards of 100,000 entries - without reflecting a proportional increase in usefulness. It would have become too unwieldy. In any case, English medical abbreviations are easy to find in many different specialised dictionaries, both in print and online, and these reference resources are usually far more exhaustive and reliable than those that have been available to date in Spanish.

c) Shortenings for medical journals and publications, except in the case of initialisms. Therefore, in the case of Revista Clínica Española, the international shortened name Rev Clín Esp is not included, but RCE is; and in the case of Gaceta Mexicana de Oncología, Gac Mex Oncol is not included, but Gamo is.

You may be surprised to find a number of Spanish abbreviations that are apparently unrelated to medicine; I have included them because they sometimes appear in medical texts. In Spain, for example, it is relatively common to find abbreviations such as CEDD (Comité Español de Disciplina Deportiva) in a text about doping, CEE (Conferencia Episcopal Española) in a bioethical text about euthanasia, IU (Izquierda Unida) in a text about medical school curricular reform, PK (punto kilométrico) in a patient’s medical report on a road traffic accident, and SS.MM. (sus majestades) in a newspaper review of a big international medical congress. Faced with the choice of including abbreviations outside the field of medicine, which may never be consulted, or leaving out general abbreviations that a medical translator may need to look up just occasionally, I opted for the former. I hope professional translators will excuse me if I have been too permissive in this respect.

Guidelines for use

Style convention

As a general rule, initialisms appear in upper case and without full stops; acronyms with an initial capital letter only (e.g., Acope for the Asociación Costarricense de Pediatría and Aeter for the Asociación Española de Terminología); contractions with full stops to indicate omission, and symbols in accordance with the styles recommended in standardised scientific nomenclatures. Therefore, initialisms such as E.P.O.C. and O.M.S. do not appear, because they are only entered as EPOC and OMS; and contractions such as vo and pm do not appear either, because they are only entered as v.o. (vía oral) and p.m. (post mortem). I have also omitted most plural initialisms and contractions that are simply formed by adding a lower case s at the end. Therefore, to find initialisms such as ONGs (organizaciones no gubernamentales) and IFNs (interferones), you should search for ONG and IFN, respectively.

With regard to expansions, I have tried to keep upper case use for proper names and specific institutions and organisations, and lower case for common expressions and generic institutions and organisations. Therefore, an initialism such as IPS is expanded in lower case as instituto politécnico de la salud (Cuba), because there are many such institutes, but in upper case as Instituto de Previsión Social (Paraguay), because there is only one.

Order of meanings

Within each entry, the different meanings are entered in alphabetical order, with plurals in their own alphabetical place. Therefore, lesiones agudas , for example, appears before lesión alveolar difusa. In the case of expressions that are commonly used in singular and plural, I have frequently drawn on inclusive forms, such as ácido(s) graso(s) saturado(s), but they are also entered in their singular alphabetical place. For the alphabetical order of meanings, I have ignored connectors (e.g., prepositions, articles and conjunctions) unless they form an integral part of the abbreviation, such as a. co. (antes de comer), LUZ (La Universidad de Zulia) and p. ej. (por ejemplo), in which case they are entered in their natural alphabetical place.

Structure of entries

Due to space constraints and in the interest of functionality, for each meaning I have simply given the corresponding expansion, any synonyms (denoted by the symbol ≡), and, in many cases, the English equivalent (denoted by the symbol ◊) with its abbreviation and expansion.

In a very few cases, where I thought it would be useful or appropriate, I have added a field with a brief comment to discuss local usage (see section below); to point out abbreviations that are archaic or obsolete (arc.); to specify those used in medical journals and other publications (rev.); to provide further information (info.); to denote a Spanish translation (trad.) in the case of expansions in other languages, from English (ingl.), Latin (lat.), French (fr.) or German (al.), to indicate a term in the original language (n. orig.), synonymous terminology (sin., =) or out-of-date variants (ant.) of names of organisations, associations or entities that have changed over time.

Localisms

Almost half the abbreviations in this repertoire have at least one specific local usage in a Spanish-speaking country. In such cases, local meanings are preceded by the corresponding country code in red font and square brackets. AR (Argentina), BO (Bolivia), CL (Chile), CR (Costa Rica), CU (Cuba), DO (Dominican Republic), EC (Ecuador), ES (Spain), GQ (Ecuatorial Guinea), GT (Guatemala), HN (Honduras), MX (Mexico), NI (Nicaragua), PA (Panama), PE (Peru), PR (Puerto Rico), PY (Paraguay), SV (El Salvador), US (United States), UY (Uruguay) and VE (Venezuela). Exceptionally, local abbreviations also have local codes such as BR (Brazil) or UK (United Kingdom). Local codes are not used for regional or supranational abbreviations, as in the case of Latin American organisations (e.g., Bireme) or European initialisms (e.g., EMEA), despite the fact that the latter is used almost exclusively in Spain.

I am not aware of any other glossary or dictionary of Spanish medical abbreviations that has as many localisms as this repertoire. However, the localisms are far from exhaustive and they are not at all homogeneous by country. I would venture to say that Spain, with over 15,300 abbreviated localisms, is the only country that has been accounted for satisfactorily. Other countries could be classified as having ‘acceptable’ cover: Mexico has about 4,700 abbreviated localisms, Argentina has 4,000, Chile, Colombia, Peru, USA and Venezuela have over 1,000, etc. To address this imbalance in future editions, I warmly invite you to send me any medical abbreviated localisms that you know of in the underrepresented countries (see Comments and suggestions in “Help us improve!“).

In the case of Spanish localisms from Catalonia, Valencia, the Balearic Islands, Galicia and the Basque Country, I have focused particularly on the three main autonomous languages: Catalan (ca), Galician (gl) and Basque (eu). In the case of initialisms formed from the expansion in Spanish (e.g., COFA,Colegio Oficial de Farmacéuticos de Álava), this is glossed first, followed by the name in the co-official language. In the case of initialisms formed from the expansion in an autonomous language (e.g., AFEO,Arabako Farmazilarien Elkargo Ofizialeko), this is glossed first, followed by the Spanish translation. Where the initialism represents the expansion in both languages, the Spanish version is glossed first.

English equivalents

One of the biggest improvements in the second edition of this repertoire is the addition of the equivalent English abbreviation and expansion. The first edition had only 1,200 English abbreviations. They were not expanded and could be searched only through their Spanish equivalent. The second edition (Version 2.27) now has over 21,000 English abbreviations with expansions, and they can be entered directly in the Advanced search box.

Polysemy

The current edition has over 15,000 abbreviations with more than one meaning, 4,882 of which have two meanings, 2,558 have three, 1,673 have four, and 5,394 have five or more meanings. In this last group, some five dozen abbreviations are particularly noteworthy because they have more than fifty meanings each. Context is therefore crucial when deciding on the precise meaning of an abbreviation in a text. DM, for example,is dermatomiositis in dermatology, but diabetes mellitus in endocrinology. However, plenty of examples of ambiguous polysemy can still be found within the same speciality: PCI means peso corporal ideal and peso corporal inicial, and CIM means concentración inhibidora máxima, concentración inhibidora media and concentración inhibidora mínima.

Synonymy

While polysemy is covered, more or less successfully, in most medical abbreviations’ dictionaries, the same does not apply in the case of synonymy, which is almost always ignored. In this repertoire, I have made a particular effort to cover synonyms comprehensively, and I am quite proud of the result. In fact, I believe that this aspect of the repertoire stands out from all other Spanish and international dictionaries of medical abbreviations.

In other dictionaries, readers are rarely warned, for example, that EEB (encefalopatía espongiforme bovina) and EVL (enfermedad de las vacas locas) are exact synonyms, as are ADR (adrenalina) and EPI (epinefrina). This oversight is especially patent in fairly common cases of multiple synonymy, such as ERCT (enfermedad renal crónica terminal), ERET (enfermedad renal en estadio terminal), ERFT (enfermedad renal en fase terminal), ERT (enfermedad renal terminal), FRT (fallo renal terminal), IRCT (insuficiencia renal crónica terminal), IRET (insuficiencia renal en etapa terminal), IRT (insuficiencia renal terminal) and NPT (nefropatía terminal), which are all used as synonymous abbreviations in practice. In such cases, you will find all the synonymous variants in the main entry, with cross references to all the synonymous forms. Thus, if you search for CAP, you will find the 35th meaning gives the common expansion for CAP in cardiology, contracción auricular prematura, followed by a cross reference symbol {→ ESA ¹¹} that links to the eleventh meaning of ESA, extrasístole auricular. The repertoire houses more than 21,000 synonymous cross references.

Siglas médicas en español