Heart failure is deemed less important than potholes in roads and pavements in the UK, according to an analysis published today.
Researchers from the Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, UK, used computer-assisted analysis of language to find out the extent to which heart failure is discussed in general contemporary English and UK parliamentary debates, and to compare it with other serious health conditions, such as cancer and dementia.
They also wanted to compare the frequency of references to heart failure in UK parliamentary debates with how many times potholes in UK roads were mentioned.
Drawing on The Oxford English Corpus (OEC) of 21st century English-language texts, which comprises 2 billion words, and the UK Hansard Reports of parliamentary debates from 1945 to early 2021, they found ‘heart failure’ occurs 4.26 times per million words (pmw) in the OEC. This compared with 3.68pmw for ‘dementia’ and 81.96 pmw for ‘cancer’.
Writing in Open Heart, they say cancer is talked about 19 times more often than heart failure and 22 times more often than dementia, even though these figures are disproportionately high in relation to actual incidence.
The number of new cases of heart failure and dementia in the UK are 200,000 and 209,600 per year, respectively, while the number of annual UK deaths caused by each disease is 64,000 and 66,424, respectively.
The number of new cases of cancer is nearly twice as high as that of the other conditions, while annual deaths are twice as high as those caused by coronary heart disease or dementia.
The term ‘heart failure’ was mentioned in UK parliamentary debates far fewer times than cancer 1945 and early 2021, and less often than ‘dementia’ from 1990 onwards.
In 2018, ‘pothole/s’ were mentioned over 10 times pmw, 37 times more often than ‘heart failure’, which was mentioned 0.28 times pmw.
The researchers acknowledge there was a debate on patients with heart failure in the UK House of Commons in March 2021, which was not accessible at the time of the study, so was not included.
“If we take frequency of mentions as an indicator of importance, the topic of [heart failure] has been much less important in UK parliamentary debates in recent years than even potholes in roads and pavements,” they write.
“It is crucial that all stakeholders involved in [heart failure] redouble their efforts to spread awareness regarding the seriousness of the condition and the pressing need to significantly improve investment in prevention, early diagnosis, and better management,” they conclude.
Demmen J, Hartshorne-Evans N, Semino E et al. Language matters: representations of ‘heart failure’ in English discourse-a large-scale linguistic study. Open Heart 28 June 2022; doi 10.1136/openhrt-2022-001988
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