Cardiovascular disease

 

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a group of diseases that affect the heart or blood vessels and it is currently the leading cause of death in Australia.

There are a number of ways you could choose to look for information about cardiovascular disease, but first you should think about the search terms you will use. Following are some suggested search terms you should consider using for your search:

·         Heart disease – this is the most commonly used term for cardiovascular disease.

·         CVD – this is the acronym for cardiovascular disease.

You could also try looking for specific heart diseases such as;

·         Cardiomyopathy – diseases of cardiac muscle

·         Heart failure

·         Pulmonary heart disease – failure on the right side of the heart.

·         Congenital heart disease – heart structure abnormalities that exist from birth.

·         Myocardial infarction – this is also known as a ‘heart attack’ (another great term you could use).

As you can see there are many options for search terms to do with heart diseases and if you like you can try them all. If you look up the Wikipedia article on ‘cardiovascular disease’ you will find a number of other great search terms to use, do remember that Wikipedia isn’t a reliable source though so you should not rely on it for your assignments.

In the Library& on the Library website

When searching the Library catalogue you will get more results using the search term “heart disease” than if you use “cardiovascular disease”. You could also find information about these diseases by looking in health books, if you have any problems finding material please ask one of the staff for assistance.
If you go to the Information desk online site you can use encyclopaedias like Britannica and World Book to access information using the keywords discussed above.  

If you then go to the Reference Databases webpage you could using the keyword suggestions we have discussed above to search in the Science Reference Center database, Academic Search Premier and Consumer Health Complete.

Online & websites that you might find useful

If you decide that Google is the way to go think about your search terms, “cardiovascular disease” because it is a more clinical term will get you higher quality results. It will also get you results from all over the world (even if you go to Google.com.au), if you want specific information about cardiovascular disease in Australian then you must put the word “Australia” somewhere in your search term.

Check out some of the websites below that are reliable sources with great information:

Cardiovascular disease This website is fantastic, it is written by the Australian Government Department of Health and not only has information about a number of heart diseases, it also gives information on treatments, has information on programmes and activities to support prevention and optimal detection and treatment and also has some amazing related links.

Australia'shealth 2014
Australia’s health 2014 is the 14th biennial health report of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. This resource contains information and statistics on the all areas to do with the health of Australians. There is a free PDF available of the report from this page.

Data and Statistics
This page is written by the Heart Foundation and has some seriously important information that will be very valuable to your research. It contains a lot of data and statistics about a variety of things related to heart disease such as the prevalence of heart disease in each state, facts and figures specifically related to Australia and links to a number of fact sheets.

Heart Disease – Australian Bureau of Statistics The Australian Bureau of Statistics is a very reliable source of data, it has some great information on heart disease and includes links to some other very valuable websites you can check out.