Medical Terminology

[cle-fable.livejournal.com]

I'm translating a newspaper article about a girl with cerebral palsy who has some kind of transplant or transfusion.  The term is:

подсадка тканей

which literally means tissue transplant.  This is so vague in English as to mean nothing.  I've heard of stem cell transfusions whereby stem cells are extracted from the bone marrow of a healthy person and injected into the blood of a patient.  Could this be what it means?

What I'm really asking is what images/ associations does this term evoke to native speakers?

Thanks in advance!

Comments

[colonelrabin.livejournal.com]

Yes, it could be some stem cell therapy. But the journalist is definitively a layman, he or she did not write any medical term, so it would be really better, if you keep it so, and don't "invent entities". "Tissue transplant" is better to let stay "tissue transplant".

[russian-bob.livejournal.com]

This is more a question to Russian-speaking doctor thant to average native speaker.

From a pure linguistic approach "подсадка тканей" sounds more "tissue implant".
Where "пересадка тканей" maps directly to "tissue transplant", i.e. "пере-" == "trans-"

[pinky-the-cow.livejournal.com]

"Подсадка тканей"... I'm not a specialized bio-technologist, but I'd imagine that a certain amount of tissues has been taken from one specimen or grown artificially, and then it's transplanted to a different person. Quite possibly without medical conditions, e.g. for a test, not pursuing therapeutic goals.

[rower.livejournal.com]

just some thoughts, as i have no medical education (except what an average soviet teenager had of first aid).
1) i have heard the term "body tissue" which AFAIK means pretty much just like "some body cells". a sensible quantity, altogether. like a piece of liver or some skin, or whatever. i guess, you think it is to inspecific, like they had to tell you exactly what tissue was used.
2) when talking of transplantation in russian you usually (just nearly always) use term ПЕРЕСАДКА. i think it implies the fact that the transplant is done in whole and is left intact afterwards. ПОДСАДКА on the other hand does not feel like implying that "whole doing" thing, it feels much more like a test transplatation, just to see if the tissue is accepted.
your version about transfusion also sounds quite having some sense to me.

[adri-nwnderland.livejournal.com]

It sounds like posadit', as in to put down and Tkani, or threads to me. So yeah, it seems more like a skin or tissue graft than a serious transplant, but english uses transplant pretty broadly.

[zauberer.livejournal.com]

As a Russian-speaking M.D. I could say that there's no medical term "подсадка тканей" that could be used in such context. So what you're dealing with is something that author of the article invented himself (I assume that you're translating from Russian into English). I guess that "tissue transplant" would be perfectly OK in such context because "подсадка тканей" actually gives not much information about what it really means.

[joliecanard.livejournal.com]

What do you think of the above poster's suggestion of tissue graft?

[zauberer.livejournal.com]

As far as I know, there's only one term which is used to describe the process of taking tissue from one place and putting it in another place to live there: "transplantation", for which the Russian equivalent would be "трансплантация" or "пересадка". And the word "подсадка" sounds not so professional to me. English word "graft", as my dictionaries tell me, is used to denote the process of transplantation or the piece of transplanted tissue, i.e. transplant. As you see, the word "graft" is also related to "transplantation" ("пересадка").

To reiterate: word "подсадка" in medical context doesn't have much sense (as apposed to botanical context, where it means "replanting").

[zauberer.livejournal.com]

Also there's a difference between transplantation and transfusion: one transfuses liquids, but transplants tissues.

[cle-fable.livejournal.com]

Thank you guys, that's really helpful. The article was quite an emotional article about raising money for a girl to have an operation - they raised enough money in the end btw. It was a local paper in Dzerzhinsk. But I don't think the medical knowledge was there at all.