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Hearts Actually Can Break
DesScorp writes "It seems that there's a grain of truth to one old wives' tale; it turns out that you really can die of a broken heart, especially if you're a post-menopausal woman. The Wall Street Journal reports on a phenomena called 'broken-heart syndrome,' which often occurs after great emotional distress. Quoting: 'In a conventional heart attack, an obstructed artery starves the heart muscle of oxygenated blood, quickly resulting in the death of tissue and potentially permanently compromising heart function. In contrast, the heart muscle in broken-heart-syndrome patients is stunned in the adrenaline surge and appears to go into hibernation. Little tissue is lost.' In the article a doctor notes, 'The cells are alive, but mechanically or electrically disabled.' Documented cases track heart attacks in people with seemingly healthy hearts after the grief of the death of a loved one. Intense feelings can cause the heart actually to change shape. Doctors call this 'tako-tsubo,' after the Japanese phrase for 'octopus trap,' so called because the syndrome was first identified by a Japanese doctor who noticed the strange shape in the left ventricle. Doctors note that while strong emotions like grief are usually associated with the syndrome, stress or a migraine can also trigger such heart attacks."
Hmm... According to this 2005 article, Dr. Ilan Wittstein came to the same conclusion after conducting a study:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1355/is_11_107/ai_n13452973/
Some might have conducted similar studies prior to his.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
I misread your note and thought I understood why your girl decided she didn't want to become Ms. Tampax.
Leave it to the Japanese to somehow work tentacles into the ailment!
:)
Liquid N2 can also break your heart. Shatter it actually
I'll let the people with mod-points take care of you. After that, please ask your parents to lock your pc. You are not ready for it yet.
This is slashdot. You think any of us have women in our lives that can break our hearts? Pfft!
No, Mom doesn't count.. and if she did... eeewww!
new pre existing condition a bad relationship right next to rape on the list.
Try being married for 27 years to a serial adulteress. That's REAL pain.
A man can hit me, punch me, kick me, stab me, cut me, shoot me, but only a woman can hurt me.
Free Martian Whores!
Perhaps you shouldn't make it 28? Life is too short to deal with someone who is terrible to you. It is a hard road to go down, but my life would have been hell without it and now I'm happier than I ever thought I could have been. Broken hearts heal.
> Try being married for 27 years to a serial adulteress
Can you please tell me where your house is located ? ;-))
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
I am a doctor.
The problem is recognizing that there actually is a problem. So many patients come in complaining of chest pain. However medicine is never about what the patient "says" is the problem (subjective data) but rather what we can objectively observe to be the problem. That's because medicine is about science, not speculation. The clinical history orients us to a range of possibilities (chest pain can be anything from muscular to pulmonary to digestive to cardiac/great vessel to neurological problems). We then ask further questions and perform tests to exclude/include certain conditions.
Because chest pain is so vague and also so common, we rely on EKGs and cardiac enzyme tests to confirm a diagnosis. Now there's a whole argument that the consequences of a heart attack are so severe that if there is doubt, we will treat it as a heart attack solely on strong clinical findings even when tests are inconclusive. However what usually happens is that the clinical history (heart disease in the family, patient age, blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes, obesity, smoking, previous heart attacks) doesn't point to a heart attack, nor is the type of pain consistent with angina, and therefore the pain is "written off" as Treitze syndrome, either correctly or incorrectly. The patient is sent home. And usually NOTHING HAPPENS. It's very rare that patients are sent home to die of a heart attack.
However a study like this (provided it receives more supporting studies) opens up a few more possible diagnoses. However I would argue that the actual "mortality" (how many people die) or "morbidity" (how many people are permanently damaged) of this "broken heart" syndrome is very very low. So now do we treat anyone with chest pain as a heart attack "for the benefit of the doubt"? How much will this cost both the patient and the tax-payer in public health systems? Hell, if we're going to treat everyone, we don't even need doctors anymore, right?
No - medicine is still about evaluating a patient and the risks and benefits of treating versus telling them "take 2 tylenol and call back in the morning". As far as I am concerned this type of information changes nothing as there is no significant evidence that people actually die this way. While this so called "broken heart" syndrome can degenerate into dysrhythmias and/or plaque rupture and heart attacks, well, we already know about those.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
EFT eh? Yes I find a strong, steady dose of Electronic Funds Transfer usually fixes a broken heart.
My great great grandmother went out that way. They immigrated from Scotland together, ran away to america as teenagers since her father wouldn't let them marry. Two days after my great great grandfather died, she passed away. They couldn't find a reason.
-- 4 8 15 16 23 42
"You are so beautiful, if you don't talk to me I could die of stress-induced cardiomyopathy"
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
You want to know what a *real* prick acts like?
Well, once years ago I had a job that included administering the company's minicomputer system. I screwed up a routine OS update, which was easy to do back in the closed source days when package Unix was up to each hardware vendor. The vendor gave us this crappy utility to run and I answered one of the questions wrong and before I knew it the company's databases were hosed.
Fortunately I had backups. Lots and lots of backups. Daily backups going back two weeks, weekly backups going back three months, and quarterly backups going back several years. Unfortunately they'd been taken on a flaky 9-track drive that I'd been begging to have replaced. The people I worked for were fine, but the folks who approved the capital budget just didn't believe that computer hardware could fail, I guess. I'd started the update at 6PM, after the end of the work day, so nobody would be inconvenienced. It took all night to restore the system, and then all the next day to find readable versions of all the data. I ended up going through the last ten days' backups before I'd stitched everything back together. I was finished the following day when people started coming in to work. I went home, after working forty eight hours straight. Everything was back, or within spitting distance.
Now my boss wasn't a computer guy, but he was a mensch, a good guy, and a few months later on my boss cited this incident on may annual review as an example of extraordinary dedication. When I sat down for my review and he handed me that evaluation, I read it, and then I threw it in his face.
*That* is the way a real prick acts.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You may want to read up on Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Generally, a having both an audience and anonymity brings out the worst in people.
Don't try to reason or argue with trolls, especially AC ones. They thrive on the attention.
Sigs are for losers
"...while strong emotions like grief are usually associated with the syndrome, stress or a migraine can also trigger such heart attacks."
Could someone please educate the author, and if necessary the researchers (though I doubt it necessary) that strong emotions like grief are stressors, as are physiological disorders like migraines? Stress is the set, grief a subset. TFA seems to imply otherwise.
Any pressures to the system are stressors, and the system requires stress in order to function. Problems are due to poor handling of stress, which is called dis-stress. Turning stress to motivation is called eustress. Too much of the former (or too poor a job at handling it) can cause damage.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I am an interventional cardiologist, and I see a new case of Takotsubo cardiomyopathy about once every 3-4 months.
It really is strongly associated with high levels of stress, and most individuals (who reach the hospital) recover within a month.
Unfortunately, when they present to the hospital, they appear as a very large heart attack, with chest pain, shortness of breath, congestive heart failure (fluid in the lungs due to a weak heart), low blood pressure and EKG changes consistent with a heart attack. The coronary arteries are normal, and the heart muscle has a pathonemonic shape. The nice thing is that if you can support them over the first couple days in the hospital, they do recover and go back to normal.
The wikipedia article on the topic is quite good, by the way.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
when they present to the hospital, they appear as a very large heart attack, with chest pain, shortness of breath, congestive heart failure (fluid in the lungs due to a weak heart), low blood pressure and EKG changes consistent with a heart attack.
GP here. Perhaps I didn't express my point clearly enough:
With such presenting signs, there is NO WAY such a patient is going to be "sent home" anyway. So frankly the original article is just a bunch of sensationalist writing trying to imply something new about things that we already know. OK, it's nice to have a name for it. Yes, there's probably a constellation of signs that differentiate it from the "non-Takotsubo" AMI which you as a specialist know all about. The prognosis is probably different, from what you imply. However my point is we've known that stress is one of many risk factors for AMI for years. What's new?
The nice thing is that if you can support them over the first couple days in the hospital, they do recover and go back to normal.
I should hope that any patient presenting dyspnea and left side heart failure gets all the support (s)he needs anyway, with or without elevated troponin levels and ST alterations...
Me I'm thinking of the hordes of people who love to clog up emergency rooms because they've "discovered" a new disease and they think they have it. Kind of like the recent H1N1 epidemic. I bet more people died in the hallways of packed emergency rooms of (name your favorite common pathology) than H1N1 last year while medical staff screened everyone who claimed to be sick. I think some medical information should stay within the medical community. Like pilots are told on obtaining their license: "congratulations, now you know just enough to kill yourself".
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Also, if a pill existed that did to the brain what falling in love does to the brain, it would be illegal.
It's called Ecstasy.
Makes you happy and warm and fuzzy, then you crash and are left depressed and stupid (which doesn't totally wear off).
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
That is still no comfort at all if you are an hour away from medical attention, but it seems like it could be quite valuable for the cases that do make it to hospital before their brains are irrecoverable mush.
And for those whose brains are mush, they can get a job as a Windows admin.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
> It's called Ecstasy.
>
> Makes you happy and warm and fuzzy, then you crash and are left depressed and stupid (which doesn't totally wear off).
Actually, thats not always the case. I, and several others, have experienced "ecstasy afterglow" where the next 2-3 days after the experience were actually quite pleasant. In fact, I was in a much happier mood than normal, and less depressed for that period.
Now, when you say ecstasy do you mean MDMA or do you mean "pills called ecstasy". I have had it offered to me, and taken it, about 4 times (and not in several years at this point). Twice it was almost certainly MDMA, based on effect and duration, once it was almost certainly MDA, and once just speed. The time that I was most sure that it was real MDMA is the only time that I got the afterglow effect, but its been reported to me by a few other people.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
With such presenting signs, there is NO WAY such a patient is going to be "sent home" anyway. So frankly the original article is just a bunch of sensationalist writing trying to imply something new about things that we already know. OK, it's nice to have a name for it. Yes, there's probably a constellation of signs that differentiate it from the "non-Takotsubo" AMI which you as a specialist know all about. The prognosis is probably different, from what you imply. However my point is we've known that stress is one of many risk factors for AMI for years. What's new?
What's different is that this isn't an AMI at all. Myocardial infarction quite literally means death of the myocytes (heart muscle). In this cardiomyopathy, there is little if any dead muscle. There's a lot of stunned muscle. The difference is that if the muscle dies, there's nothing that can be done to make it move again. If it is stunned, it will move again on it's own, given enough time to recover.
The other thing is that the stress that causes Takotsubo cardiomyopathy causes a very different effect on the heart than the stress that causes an acute myocardial infarction. In AMI, the stress causes plaque rupture in one of the coronary arteries, leading to thrombus formation within the coronary artery and obstruction to the flow of blood. In Takotsubo, it's unclear what the stress actually did, but it certainly isn't causing a demonstrable plaque rupture. It's possible that it's causing transient spasm of the left main coronary artery, or possibly spasm of the entire capillary bed.
Also, Takotsubo cardiomyopathy has been known about for more than a decade. It just gets in the news every Valentine's day or so. :-)
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Well , you don't need to be in love , but you certainly need someone to talk to (intimately) every now and then.
But a good friend may be sufficient for that.
Note : if that good friend breaks contact with you , I'm pretty that will also break your heart.
In other words : you need some sort of commitment to be happy , and that commitment leaves you vulnerable.
Slipping shoelaces ?
you need some sort of commitment to be happy
That is not true. There are plenty of unmarried people out there. If they weren't happy they are free to marry. They don't. Therefore they are happy.
that commitment leaves you vulnerable
Very true.