Five linguistic misrepresentations of Huntington’s disease

Abstract

The efficacy of communication about medical research lies in the ability to relay medical jargon in scientific papers. When inaccurate terms are used in the medical literature, for example of diseases or conditions due to paraphrasing, then the impact of the text is reduced, while ambiguity may arise, thus reducing the effectiveness of communication, while possibly having a negative impact on documents related to heath policy. The colloquial term, “tortured phrases,” describes such instances of linguistically irregular scientific terms. In this study, Huntington’s disease (HD) is used as an example to show how established medical jargon can be linguistically modified, leading to the creation of inaccurate medical terms. A total of 16 cases of five forms of linguistic distortions of HD were discovered in January 2025: “Huntington’s ailment,” “Huntington’s illness,” “Huntington’s infection,” “Huntington’s malady,” and “Huntington’s sickness.” The most frequent “tortured phrase” (six cases) was “Huntington’s ailment.” To avoid the distribution – through citation – and use of these erroneous terms, including in health policy literature, distorted jargon in these papers should be corrected.

Keywords

• editorial and peer oversight
• genetics
• neurological disease
• neuropsychiatry