International Journal of Cardiovascular Sciences. 30/Jun/2022;35(4):521-2.
The Medical Burden of Heart Failure and Cancer in Brazil. Fact or Fiction?
Ricardo Mourilhe-Rocha
, Pedro Fernandes Ribeiro
Cardiovascular disease and cancer are the leading causes of mortality in most high-income countries around the globe. It is estimated by the Brazilian Ministry of Health that circulatory diseases and cancer are the leading causes of mortality in patients over 50 years of age, which makes them the main public health concerns in absolute numbers. This is not only true in treatment-related costs, but also in terms of social harm imposed on an economically productive population and the health system this population subsidizes.
Recently, Almeida et al. have published a comparative analysis on mortality rates for patients with heart failure. The paper performed a retrospective comparative analysis with data retrieved from DataSUS, an administrative database from brazilian’s public health system and was able to reach the conclusion that heart failure has a prognosis that is worse than many types of cancer. As the author himself says, the paper is limited by the administrative characteristics of the database itself, and, as already mentioned in the BREATHE registry, this kind of data has inherent limitations.
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Keywords: Heart failure; Cancer; Epidemiology
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