Heart Attack in the News, 2019–2026: Peaks, Geography and Tone of Global Coverage of Heart Attack and Cardiac Arrest, and How It Compares with Research and Invention

We measure how heart attack and cardiac arrest were covered in a global news index from January 2019 to July 2026, using 104,450 de-duplicated articles, and set that coverage beside 69,305 research papers (2015–2025) and 1,470 patent families (2015–2024) on the same conditions. Six results stand out: Peaks coincide with named events. The topic's largest monthly share of news was January 2023, at 19.89 articles per 10,000, the month of an on-field cardiac arrest in a televised American football game. That is 2.23 times the 2023 annual share. Attention, not incidence. The topic took 8.84 articles per 10,000 in 2019 and 6.04 in 2025, a 31.7% smaller share. Raw counts rose, but the index grew faster. Geography. India's share of located coverage is 2.12 times its share of all news. The United States, the largest source of located articles (40.15%), is under-represented at 0.83. By continent, Asia (1.43) is over-represented and Africa (0.28) is not. Within India, Madhya Pradesh (1.72), Telangana (1.47) and Punjab (1.46) lead; within the United States, Ohio (3.23), Connecticut (1.81) and Utah (1.77). Tone and urgency. 61.9% of articles are negative in tone (all news: 33.6%), and 80.4% are rated critical priority (all news: 42.6%). Obituaries, celebrity deaths and sports injury reports are among the most common themes. Measurement. 17.04% of raw matches were structured research abstracts or figurative uses ("gave me a heart attack") and were excluded. News used "heart attack" 1.82 times as often as "cardiac arrest". Research and invention. Papers on the topic rose from 8.06 to 10.99 per 10,000 papers between 2015 and 2025 (1.36-fold). The number of patent families grew 2.03-fold from 2015 to 2024, and China's office published the most (776 of 1,470).