Around the early 1990s, Japanese researchers demonstrated for the first time that suffering from severe emotional or physical stress can cause a sometimes temporary, sometimes lethal heart disease called shattered heart syndrome or takotsubo cardiomyopathy .
The main symptoms caused by takotsubo cardiomyopathy are dyspnea, chest pain, transient cardiac changes (arrhythmias), changes in blood pressure and fainting.These same disorders also appear during a heart attack, although this has no common feature with broken heart syndrome, except that it is a heart disease.
Going further into the details of the differences ...
A heart attack (also called myocardial infarction ) is caused by a partial or total obstruction of one or more coronary arteries, which have the task of supplying oxygen to the heart muscle. The lack of oxygen leads to the necrosis (ie death) of the affected myocardium and, with the death of part of the heart muscle, there is a reduction in the contractile capacity of the heart.
Myocardial infarction is related to atherosclerosis .
Instead, inducing takotsubo cardiomyopathy is probably a quantitative alteration of some stress- related hormones ( adrenaline and noradrenaline ): this hormonal variation, in fact, would seem to change (before) the normal anatomy and (then) the functionality of the tissue muscle that makes up the left ventricle.
Thus, the effects of takotsubo cardiomyopathy are not related to internal narrowing of the coronary arteries, nor to processes of myocardial necrosis. Moreover, even cardiac healthy people may be affected.
