I'm a medical professional and I read medical journals regularly. Abbreviations and acronyms are a scourge, a single article can have dozens of cryptic abbreviated names. There's a good chance some are used that I don't immediately recognize and decipher. Some journals print a list of the articles abbreviated forms along with the "long" form which is quite helpful.

Of course, authors are supposed to given the long form and abbreviated form in parentheses. The trouble is in printed journals it can be difficult to find the first use of the abbreviation. Fortunately viewing articles in an electronic medium it's usually possible to do a search which is a real time-saver.

Furthermore, an abbreviation can have multiple meanings, especially across disciplines. For example, PSA can stand for prostate specific antigen, pressure-sensitive adhesive, public service announcement and probably some others too. Anyway I try to be mindful of the ambiguity abbreviations can produce. By all means, spelling out the term(s) abbreviations refer to should be considered mandatory.

"PSA" can also be probabilistic sensitivity analysis. I do health economic evaluations for prostate cancer screening -- which leads to interesting ambiguities:).

Yeah, sorry about "CJD" and "CWD" - it was hard to fit the title in with the Hacker News 80-character limit.