Broken hearts are a real medical issue

If you have a heart, it will be broken, the bards say. Sadly, the doctors say a broken heart can actually be an illness.

According to Harvard Medical School, broken-heart syndrome, also called takotsubo cardiomyopathy, was first identified several decades ago in Japan. Although rarely diagnosed, it is most commonly seen in older women.

Patients experience a dramatic stressor in their lives (death, violence, or fear). The event causes a surge in hormones such as adrenaline. These hormones can stun the heart and lead to irregularities of the heart’s proper functions. The left ventricle in the heart weakens and balloons outward in a strange shape that looks like a Japanese octopus trap (a tako-tsubo). When a patient has this feature and no blocks in the coronary arteries, doctors can distinguish the disorder from a heart attack.

For the patient, it feels like a heart attack with chest pain and shortness of breath.

Medical professionals thought for many years that takotsubo sufferers could recover in about a month without any long-term repercussions but recent research published in the Journal of the American Society of Echocardiography has shown that it can have an impact for years after the initial event. These patients exhibited lingering signs that were very similar to those found in people with chronic heart failure – a condition that involves heart muscle death and does not currently have a reliable cure.