Cardiology in Portuguese

The list opens with a frequência cardíaca em repouso, and the first noun is the one word on this page an English reader should refuse to carry straight across. A frequência is what a heart does per minute, and English calls that « rate »: a resting heart rate, a fast rate, a rate of sixty. « Frequency » is not a synonym of it. In English medicine « frequency » answers how often something returns, not how fast a process runs, and its most familiar use is a symptom in its own right — « urinary frequency » means passing water too often, and no heartbeat is involved. So « cardiac frequency » reads as a translation rather than as a finding, and « the frequency of the arrhythmia » says something else again: how often the episodes come back. The pair is worth learning together, because the rest of the list obeys it. Wherever Portuguese counts events against time, English reaches for « rate » — heart rate, respiratory rate, flow rate, rate of fall — and keeps « frequency » for the question of recurrence.