‘Broken-heart Syndrome’ Also Caused by Too Much Happiness

Takotsubo syndrome, first described in the medical literature in 1990, has come to be known as “broken-heart syndrome.” Grief, anger or fear in excess can cause serious overstimulation of the nervous system, which leads to heart arrhythmias or outright sudden cardiac death.

But the same emotional pathways can be jolted by extreme happiness – leading to the same danger of a heart failure, according to a new Swiss study in the European Heart Journal [1].

“Positive emotions modulate the autonomic nervous system response to a similar degree as do negative emotions, which in turn alter heart rate, peripheral vascular resistance, and blood pressure,” write the team, primarily from University Hospital Zurich. “We intend to raise awareness and compare this new conceptual entity of ‘happy heart syndrome’ with ‘broken heart syndrome.’”

The study looked at 485 patients from the Takotsubo International Registry [2]. All of the patients had a definite emotional trigger preceding their cardiovascular events.

The vast majority had an extreme negative event – some 96 percent could be described as having “broken-heart syndrome.”

But the remaining four percent of the Takotsubo patients instead had only extremely positive experiences prior to their deaths – meaning they instead had an opposite “happy heart syndrome.”

Read more: Precision Medicine Prevents Common Cardiovascular Disease in Mice [3]

The negative triggers were split between a wide variety of factors, from the death of a spouse, to having an accident, from divorce to having a simple argument.

A prime example is that a person is 27 percent more likely to experience a cardiovascular event on one’s birthday than any other single day throughout the year.

Roughly 95 percent of the patients who displayed either the happy or sad Takotsubo cases were females, according to the data.

Takotsubo was first described by doctors in Japan in 1990, and was first analyzed in the United States in 1998. However, the literature has since come to delve further into the condition: a handful of studies by the year 2000 had ballooned to hundreds by the year 2010, according to a meta-analysis published in 2011 in the journal Circulation [4].

Takotsubo patients are often mistaken for common heart attacks, since the symptoms of chest pain and shortness of breath are similar to plaque buildup in the arteries. Only detailed follow-up after the event can identify the deformation of the left ventricle that is characteristic of the trauma from Takotsubo.

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