Editor—The editorial by Lehman et al debates renaming heart failure.1 We agree from our research that many patients do not understand what the term heart failure means. We believe that it would be a shame to substitute the word “heart” with “cardiac”: this may cause more confusion as many patients may not know what the word cardiac means.
We interviewed 40 patients from around the country at different stages of heart failure, and many of them discussed their confusion about the meaning of heart failure—several said that the word failure was unhelpful (these interviews can be seen on www.dipex.org/heartfailure).
Before officially renaming, it might be helpful to have a wider debate about this and ask patients for their opinions.
Competing interests: Both authors have done research on heart failure in 2003 for DIPEx, University of Oxford.
References
- 1.Lehman R, Doust J, Glasziou P. Cardiac impairment or heart failure? BMJ 2005;331: 415-6. (20-27 August.) [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]