The Need for Creating a Unified Knowledge of Cardiovascular Diseases in Latin America

Abstract

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) have persistently been the principal cause of disease burden and mortality throughout the world as well as in Latin America (LATAM)[1,2]. Congruently, as CVDs continue to grow, the research production in this discipline has followed the same trend; global CVD publications have been increasing in the last decades[3,4]. However, as with other health-related topics, disparities in the quantity of research exist when comparing lowand middle-income countries with high-income nations[3,4]. Despite the simultaneous increasing trend in CVD research output in LATAM, this region is clearly behind in terms of publications when compared to North America or Europe. A bibliometric analysis of CVD papers in PubMed® identified that 4% of them were from LATAM, as opposed to 40% from European countries[5]. Even between Latin American countries, disparities also exist, with Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico being the most represented countries in published research in the region[5,6]. As a reader, when assessing collaborative or pooled studies such as clinical trials or systematic reviews, there seems to be a lower representation of the Latin American population, publications, and/or journals. This could possibly be explained due to language barriers, as Spanish or Portuguese publications are excluded in many cases from systematic reviews, or due to the lack of indexation of many Latin American medical journals in major international databases such as PubMed®/MEDLINE®[7,8]. In our recent experience, we identified that information about the Latin American population’s characteristics of infective endocarditis (IE) was lacking. Therefore, our approach was to conduct a systematic review including the two major international databases, as well as two regional Latin American databases. We identified and described compiled information on the major characteristics of IE that hopefully will be useful, or at least be a starting point for clinicians, researchers, and local guidelines[9]. Efforts to develop a unified knowledge, via systematic reviews, have also been conducted by other authors in the field of CVDs in LATAM[10,11]. For instance, Ciapponi et al.[10] DOI: 10.21470/1678-9741-2022-0954