CAN YOU DIE OF A BROKEN HEARTH? PART 2

The following year, a different group of researchers took a look at sudden cardiac-related deaths in Los Angeles on 17 January 1994. That day was when a magnitude 6.8 earthquake – "one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded in a major city in North America," the researchers noted – struck the region at 4:31am. In the New England Journal of Medicine, they reported a massive spike in cardiovascular-related deaths due to the stress of the early-morning jolt. As in the case of the Israeli missile attacks, that doesn't include traumatic injuries directly caused by the earthquake. These deaths are instead attributable to the extreme stress of being shaken awake by a violent earthquake. It should be noted, however, that many of those who died were not entirely healthy to begin with. In the 1990s Japanese researchers coined the term “takotsubo cardiomyopathy” to describe a stress-induced apparent heart attack. It was so-named because the ballooning of the left ventricle characteristic of this sort of cardiomyopathy is reminiscent to a type of fishing pot, called takotsubo, which are used to trap octopuses. View image of Heart failure due to emotional stress was only full accepted as a diagnosis in the last decade (SPL) But it wasn't until 2005 that enough studies had been described in the medical literature that human medicine began to fully take note. That year the concept of stress cardiomyopathywas firmly established within the medical literature, though many physicians still refer to is as takotsubo, or occasionally as "broken heart syndrome." So while it isn’t necessarily sadness or rejection that can hurt us physiologically, there is now little doubt that the mind and our emotions can have a direct, measurable effect on our physical bodies, and when things take a turn for the worse, it can lead to catastrophe. After consulting with veterinarians at the Los Angeles Zoo, it was Natterson-Horowitz, a UCLA cardiology professor, who put the heart-related aspects of capture myopathy with takotsubo cardiomyopathy side by side. In Zoobiquity, she and Bowers, a journalist, ask whether the two syndromes are really one and the same, afflicting humans and animals alike. It’s just a shame that it took so long for doctors to accept what wildlife biologists and veterinarians had known for decades. If this episode teaches us anything, it’s that the traits we share with animals run far deeper than first appears. As this column has explored, the commonalities are myriad, whether it’s the ability to dance, to rule by democracy, or to lure the opposite sex with perfume. They’re written into the very fabric of our biology. Our species occupies but one tiny branch on the enormous tree of life; it would be a shame if our hubris prevented us from applying knowledge derived from decades of research on every other species on the planet to our own.