metastases

Noun

metastasis (countable and uncountable, plural metastases)

1. A change in nature, form, or quality.
   • Stayed in her own house, searched her body each morning and examined her conscience each night for progressive symptoms of the metastasis she feared was in her.1963, Thomas Pynchon, V.
2. (figuratively) The spread of something harmful to another location, such as the metastasis of a cancer.
3. (rhetoric) A sudden or rapid transition from one point, topic or argument to another, often to evade an uncomfortable subject or to redirect the discussion.
4. The transference of a bodily function or disease to another part of the body, specifically the development of a secondary area of disease remote from the original site, as with some cancers.
   • Among the hypothesized diagnoses was metastatic carcinoma. In metastatic cancer, metastases are most frequent in the axial skeleton and are rare in the distal parts of the appendicular skeleton[…].2023, Simon Mays, “The Macroscopic Study of Human Skeletal Paleopathology” (chapter 2), in The Routledge Handbook of Paleopathology, Routledge, →DOI, →ISBN, page 27