Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Ischemia
/ɪsˈkimiə/noun
A restriction of blood supply to a tissue, starving it of oxygen.
The Greek roots
ἴσχω
ískhō
to hold back, check
αἷμα
haîma
blood
Literally: “holding back of blood”
The story of the word
The verb ἴσχω means to hold back or restrain, so the word describes blood checked at the door rather than blood lost. Nineteenth-century pathologists needed a name for the state that comes before an infarct, when a tissue is still alive but not being fed. The same αἷμα sits inside anaemia, haemorrhage and haemoglobin; British spelling keeps the digraph, American English trimmed it to ischemia.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
anaemiahaemorrhagehaematomaleukaemia
In a sentence
The scan showed ischemia in the left ventricle, but no dead tissue yet.
Cold fingers that stay white for an hour can mean ischemia rather than bad circulation.