patológica

Patológica is the feminine form of the Spanish adjective patológico, used to describe things related to pathology or to abnormal, disease-associated conditions. It appears in medical, scientific, and everyday language to mark entities as connected with disease or abnormality.

In medical contexts, patológica qualifies findings or processes linked to disease. Examples include lesión patológica, proceso patológico, and células patológicas. The term is common in vocabularies used by clinicians and pathologists to describe what is observed in tissues, fluids, or clinical presentations. Pathology is the medical discipline that studies the causes, development, and effects of disease, and its subfields include histopatología, citopatología, patología molecular, patología clínica, and patología quirúrgica.

Patológica is also used metaphorically to refer to behavior or phenomena considered extreme, irrational, or deviant, such as conducta patológica or amor patológico. In literature, journalism, and everyday speech, it conveys a sense of abnormality that echoes medical usage, even when no physical disease is involved.

Etymology-wise, patológica derives from Greek pathos, meaning suffering, and -logia, meaning study of. The feminine form corresponds to the feminine noun it describes; the masculine counterpart is patológico. While clinically neutral, the term can carry evaluative or emphatic nuance in non-medical contexts.