6.1.3.12. Malformation, deformation, anomaly

As illustrated in figure 1 and described in section 4.1, a deformation is a structural abnormality that is due to an extrinsic physical force. Malformations are those structural abnormalities that result from intrinsically disordered structural development. The word anomaly is, by itself, ambiguous because it may be used to mean any abnormality including non-structural ones, or it may be used to mean malformation, or it may be a general term that includes both malformation and deformation. Terms that contain the word anomaly must therefore be examined to see whether the additional words provide sufficient specificity to overcome the inherent ambiguity. Congenital anomaly of <x structure> is definitely structural but is not the same as congenital malformation, and therefore it can be regarded as having the more general meaning of structural abnormality present at birth.