Survey results that will be presented during Heart Failure 2019 in Athens a few weeks from now are a good opportunity to discuss facts and myths about heart disease. Including some held by cardiologists.

20 percent of believe believe, for example, that heart disease patients should avoid exercise while just over 50 percent know that exercise can be a treatment for their disease. Meanwhile, doctors are unsure about the conflict between cancer treatment and heart disease. Does cancer promote heart disease? There are common pathways in tumor growth and heart failure and some cancer therapies are toxic to the heart so it could be that, or the other way around.

The theme of the is, "Heart failure: from alpha to omega" so topics will cover the entire heart failure journey, from prevention through to palliative and end of life care. Epidemiologists are represented among the 1,700 abstracts submitted, so if you want to believe Yogic breathing will help with chronic heart failure, that in vitro fertilization can be linked to heart failure, or that gut microbes can explain every disease, there will be something for you. 

But important topics will include what is different about heart failure in women, and how reducing alcohol, smoking, and weight gain can help, mixed in with less evidence-based claims about sodium restriction, sex, and non-smoking use of tobacco.

The full program is here but if you are a member of the press, and your job title does not include the letters BBC or NYT, they seem to have little interest in you.


Do they think anyone is flying to Greece and paying for a hotel to get into a conference on heart failure for free? 

Ironically, someone there will have presentations on social media outreach. So they don't want any media that is not large corporations they've heard of, while any social media expert with a clue can tell them 99.99% of the public does not get their health information from corporate media outlets.