Why aren't more people discussing heart failure?
In the battle for public attention, heart failure seems to be losing badly—at least, that’s the conclusion of a new study which determined that even not-so-scintillating topics like potholes are more frequently spoken about in British parliamentary debates than heart failure.
The BMJ Journals study performed a frequency search for the words “heart failure” in the UK Hansard Reports of parliamentary debates from 1945 to 2021, as well as in the Oxford English Corpus of 21st-century English-language texts (OEC). For comparative purposes, the authors also looked for the terms “cancer” and “dementia.”
The results show that “cancer” is most common by far, occurring nearly 82 times per million words, while “heart failure” occurs just 4.26 times per million words in the OEC. “Dementia” occurs even less often, at 3.68 times per million words.
“These are disproportionately high in relation to actual incidence,” write Jane Dimmen, PhD, of the University of Lancaster, and co-authors. “Annual cancer incidence is 1.8 times that of the other conditions; annual cancer mortality is two times that caused by coronary heart disease (including HF) or dementia.”
For good measure and to demonstrate just how little the subject is covered in comparison with other societal problems, the study’s authors also performed a frequency search for another word in the UK Hansard Reports: “potholes.” The results? Potholes beat out heart failure by a landslide, used 37 times more often during British parliamentary debates.
The tongue-in-cheek observation highlights a much more serious conundrum: why are so few people talking and writing about heart failure, a condition that causes 64,000 deaths in the UK alone?
Additionally, the report highlights another failed opportunity for discussion: when the topic is covered, people tend to write or speak about it in highly technical or formulaic terms that can come off as less relatable or urgent than the ways in which they talk about cancer.
For example, people with cancer are commonly portrayed as active and empowered participants who are “fighting” or “battling” cancer, with these types of “survivor narratives” portraying cancer as the enemy or opposing force—and implying that it’s something that people can beat.
“These contrasted with the formulaic uses of ‘heart failure’ as a cause of death, in which the person who suffers it was framed as a passive recipient,” the authors note.
The authors conclude that relative to its seriousness, heart failure is under discussed. "Language matters," they write, and the language surrounding the heart failure conversation has a lot more room to reach hearts and minds—hopefully including lots of healthy ones.
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Reference:
1. Demmen J, Hartshorne-Evans N, Semino E, et al. Language matters: representations of ‘heart failure’ in English discourse—a large-scale linguistic study. BMJ Journals: Open Heart. June 30, 2022 doi: 10.1136/openhrt-2022-001988