CATCH 22 – The other side!
I was skimming through an article in nature and usually when I do this I feel that there are a whole lot of words that I have not come across before and I never knew such existed. But this reading experience had been different, infact there was a surge of conceit instead of an uneasiness of ignorance (though sometimes ignorance is bliss!). I had an understanding of everything from the first word till this one…and at the advent to this word, the dander that had seemed to surround me had vanished. “CATCH 22”! I am sure that this word does ring the bell when you look at it or even hear about it and me was in no different boat! All that I had known about Catch-22 is a 1961 novel by Joseph Heller and that it deals with the World War II.I was infact a little surprised about its relevance in a medical arena and with this stinging curiosity, I had proceeded further to unravel the mystery.
CATCH22 was an acronym for ‘Cardiac Anomaly, T-cell deficit, Clefting and Hypocalcaemia’ and that it results from the microdeletions in chromosome 22q11.2.But still I wanted to know if there was any other reason to have given it such an acronym, besides just “CATCH” should have been fine, and alas I could find no such corroboration. I did do a small self analysis of the situation when the doc tells me “I am sorry to tell you that you have CATCH22”. It sounds absolutely funny until you know what it actually means and it seemed like a terrible cover up to an impending danger. With the strong feeling that such acronyms should not be given to medical conditions, I proceeded with the rest of the article, which had just another sentence left. But this was the best line of the excerpt, not that it was written well, but just that I liked the information that it conveyed. It said that this acronym is abandoned from use because of its no-win connotations. I finished the article with a smile on my face!
posted by Uma | 8:43 PM
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