sclerosis
/sklɪəˈrəʊsɪs
/ /skləˈrəʊsɪs/noun [mass noun]
1 Medicine Abnormal hardening of body tissue.In MS, myelin is lost in multiple areas, leaving scar tissue called sclerosis....
- The lymph node biopsy showed sclerosis surrounding cellular nodules that contained clusters of large atypical cells admixed with small lymphocytes and numerous eosinophils.
- It exhibited squamous differentiation, sclerosis, and eosinophilia.
1.1 (in full multiple sclerosis) A chronic, typically progressive disease involving damage to the sheaths of nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord, whose symptoms may include numbness, impairment of speech and of muscular coordination, blurred vision, and severe fatigue. Also called disseminated sclerosis.Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is a progressive disease affecting both upper and lower motor neurons....
- Other collagen diseases, such as progressive systemic sclerosis and systemic lupus erythematosus, are associated with increased incidence of pneumothorax.
- Among this latter group, there were four patients with rheumatoid arthritis, five with systemic sclerosis, three with systemic lupus erythematosus, five with dermatomyositis, and four with mixed connective tissue disease.
2Excessive resistance to change: the challenge was to avoid institutional sclerosis...
- In other words, this is a story not about institutional sclerosis, but about the necessarily contingent process of institutional change.
Origin
Late Middle English (originally denoting a hard external tumour): via medieval Latin from Greek sklērōsis, from sklēroun 'harden'.