Broken heart has become a globally recognized and powerful metaphor present from folklore to popular culture to high literature and back to everyday communication.
Broken heart syndrome, also called stress-induced cardiomyopathy or takotsubo cardiomyopathy, can strike even if you’re healthy.
Broken heart syndrome is a sudden weakness in your heart muscle. This happens right after a physically or emotionally stressful event. The condition can last a few days or weeks. With medicine, most people recover completely. Broken heart syndrome may be misdiagnosed as a heart attack because the symptoms and test results are similar. Tests show dramatic changes in rhythm and blood substances that are typical of a heart attack. But unlike a heart attack, there’s no evidence of blocked heart arteries. In broken heart syndrome, a part of your heart temporarily enlarges and doesn’t pump well, while the rest of your heart functions normally or with even more forceful contractions. The most common signs and symptoms of broken heart syndrome are angina (chest pain) and shortness of breath. You can experience these things even if you have no history of heart disease.
Arrhythmias (abnormal heartbeats) or cardiogenic shock also may occur with broken heart syndrome. Cardiogenic shock is a condition in which a suddenly weakened heart can’t pump enough blood to meet the body’s needs, and it can be fatal if it isn’t treated right away.
According to Hassan and Yamasaki (2013) and quite apart from the general perception medical notions of the broken heart indeed go back to at least 1967, when Rees and Lutkins studied the death rate among 903 relatives of patients who died in Wales. They found that 4.8% of bereaved close relatives died within a year of bereavement compared with 0.68% of a non-bereaved control group. Among widows and widowers, the mortality rate was even 10 times greater than that of the matched controls. After the first year of bereavement, however, mortality rates of relatives of a deceased person did not differ significantly from the control group Rees and Lutkins (1967). Similar findings were published by Parkes et al. (1969) following up on 4486 widowers at the age of 55 for 9 years following the death of their wives in 1957. During the first six months after the spouse had died, the mortality rate of the widowers was 40% above the rate of married men of the same age.
The exact cause of broken heart syndrome is not fully understood, but many doctors believe it can be triggered by mental or physical stress. It can be a traumatic event, such as the death of a spouse, or something that causes the patient to worry, such as an upcoming surgery.
According to the 2018 study, risk factors can include anxiety/depression, diabetes, substance abuse disorders, and asthma/chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Because it primarily affects older women, some have hypothesized that the condition may be linked to estrogen levels.