Descriptive terminology used in modern cardiovascular medicine.

The terms used to designate the type of heart disease (or any other disease) must be chosen carefully. This is more important now than it was several decades ago. An effort must always be made to designate the exact etiology, as well as the exact subset, of the disease. As pointed out in the beginning of this editorial, I became concerned because a reader believed that the word "heart" in the term "coronary heart disease" was redundant. The article this reader was criticizing was about the most common type of coronary disease, atherosclerosis. In that article, "coronary heart disease" was used to indicate that the coronary artery disease was sufficiently severe to produce myocardial events such as angina, infarct, or death. No attempt has been made to describe all the types of heart disease in this editorial. Although the major types of heart disease are described, the objectives of this editorial are to highlight the need for the proper use of terminology and to answer a note from an anonymous reader.