‘The Notebook’, a novel by Nicholas Sparks and a movie, starring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, sees the lead pair growing old and dying together. Debbie Reynolds died exactly one day after her daughter, Carrie Fisher, in December. And the reason for her death remains unknown. There have been very rare cases where we come across couples dying within months, days, or even hours of one another. And it’s not just in movies. Every once in a while you’ll find a rarity like this and it only ever happens with a couple, or two people who share a blood relation that is strengthened by their love for each other. It’s never random, not even when the cause of death seems to be uncertain.
Broken Hearts Syndrome is real. A broken heart can cause long-term damage to the heart; and in some cases, it can lead to death. A study funded by the British Heart Foundation had a team of medical researchers from the University of Aberdeen follow 52 patients, aged between 28 and 87, suffering with what is called takotsubo cardiomyopathy, over a period of 4 months. The study has been published in the Journal of the American Society of Echocardiography. The term that was originally coined in Japan in 1990, is said to be aggravated when the heart muscle is stunned or shocked suddenly, causing the left ventricle to change its shape due to ‘intense emotional or physical stress’. Triggers include emotional distress, including, but not limited to, the death of a loved one.
The BHF defined the condition as temporary condition where your heart muscle becomes suddenly weakened or stunned. The left ventricle, one of the heart’s chambers, changes shape. The condition that can even cause temporary heart failure disrupts the heart’s ability to pump blood. The British Heart Foundation went on to state that the condition has no known medical cure. Hearts do break and when that happens, it never works the same way again—not emotionally, and now we know that neither does it function effectively in the physical sense, either. This research is important not only to establish the fact that hearts once broken can actually cause severe physical damage to people; but also to prove that the human heart cannot always fully recover from such conditions, as was previously perceived.
“This study has shown that in some patients who develop takotsubo cardiomyopathy, various aspects of heart function remain abnormal for up to four months afterwards,” said Professor Metin Avkiran, associate medical director at the BHF, in an interview with the Telegraph. “Worryingly, these patients’ hearts appear to show a form of scarring, indicating that full recovery may take much longer, or indeed may not occur, with current care. This highlights the need to urgently find new and more effective treatments for this devastating condition.”
Using ultrasounds and cardiac MRIs, the researchers at Aberdeen University concluded that the syndrome had a permanent affect on the heart’s pumping motion and delayed the “wringing” or vibratory motion that the heart makes while beating. The condition is also said to hamper the heart’s squeezing, as well as cause scarring on the heart’s muscles in a way that prevented it from proper contraction.
While in a majority of cases, the left ventricle slowly returns to its normal shape over the next few days, months, or years, according to statistics, of the people suffering from takotsubo, or broken heart syndrome, anywhere between 3 to 17 per cent of them die within 5 years of being diagnosed. 90 per cent of these are said to be female which isn’t surprising really, since women do tend to feel and be more sensitive emotionally.
“We used to think that people who suffered from takotsubo cardiomyopathy would fully recover, without medical intervention. Here we’ve shown that this disease has much longer lasting damaging effects on the hearts of those who suffer from it,” said Dr Dana Dawson, reader in cardiovascular medicine at the University of Aberdeen. About 3 years ago, research in relation to this was conducted at JAMA Internal Medicine, that showed that the number of people having a heart attack or a stroke in the month right after the death of a loved-one was double compared to that of a matched control group who were not grieving. The figures were recorded as 50 out of 30,447 in the bereaved group, or 0.16%, compared with 67 out of 83,588 in the non-bereaved group, or 0.08%. Speaking about the study, Dr Sunil Shah of St George’s at the University of London, told the BBC, “We often use the term a ‘broken heart’ to signify the pain of losing a loved-one and our study shows that bereavement can have a direct effect on the health of the heart.”
Some researchers seem to think that because a mutually supportive marriage acts as a buffer against stress and other negative factors, the loss of such a partner could prove to have long-term damaging effects.
Go ahead and give it a poetic and melancholic twist to sound like romantics. And if you’re among the ones who still brush this off as just another scientific study, that’s all good for you; just try not to be the reason why someone else has a broken heart though. Okay?
Article from: RELATIONSHIPS, by Dessidre Fleming
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