You really can die from a broken heart — but sometimes, it can happen long after you have lost your mate. And sometimes, it can happen for no reason at all.
The condition long known as “broken-heart syndrome” and “widowhood disease” is generally not precipitated by a stressful event, though it is called “stress cardiomyopathy.”
That’s according to a new study published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine, which sheds light on the heart rhythm condition.
When first described, in Japan in 1990, it was called Takotsubo cardiomyopathy — named for an octopus trap that resembles the changed shape of the heart after a stressful event — but those researchers believed the condition was largely harmless. They knew a lot less than doctors do these days.
The international study, the first large-scale examination of the condition, finds that it can happen in younger patients and that its triggers are more often physical (36%) than emotional (27.7%). Those physical triggers include broken bones, respiratory failure and brain injuries.
What’s scarier, more than 28% of the patients seemed to have no triggering event at all.
“This condition has been thought of as a benign disease, but it is actually a life-threatening disease,” said study author Dr. Jelena Ghadri of the University Hospital Zurich in Switzerland. “It is an acute heart failure syndrome associated with substantial morbidity and mortality.”
The majority of the 1,750 patients studied — almost 90% — were women, though the condition killed a greater percentage (13%) of the men than women and claimed the lives of more than double the percentage of men (5.6%) diagnosed with acute coronary syndrome.
Patients who had stress cardiomyopathy were also more likely to have a history of neurological or psychological problems, plus other heart irregularities, compared to those who displayed similar symptoms but did not have “broken-heart syndrome.”
A higher number of patients experienced a significant cardiac event — like a stroke, or even death — long after their hospital admission, rather than 30 days thereafter, the authors reported.
