HEARTBREAK REALLY CAN BREAK THE PHYSICAL HEART

Heartbreak isn’t just an emotion we feel, it’s actually physical damage being done to us by our brains, scientists have revealed.

Swiss experts have been studying people with “broken heart syndrome”.

It is a rare condition that causes the heart to weaken and fail as a result of a stressful or emotional event such as a death.

Until now, we haven’t known very much about why it happens.

But this recent study suggests that it could all be down to the mind’s response to stress.

Also known as takotsubo syndrome, broken heart syndrome can be brought on by shock – both positive and negative.

It’s not the same as a heart attack, which is caused by blocked blood vessels, but it has some similar symptoms such as chest pain and breathlessness.

It’s more common in women, with only about 10 per cent of cases occurring in men.

And while the heart muscles can recover over a few days, weeks or months – for some, the condition can be fatal.

A team at University Hospital Zurich looked at what happened in the brains of 15 patients with broken heart syndrome.

Their brain scans threw up noticeable differences compared with scans from a group of 39 healthy people.

The group found that there was less communication between brain regions responsible for controlling emotions and body responses – such as heartbeats.

And it is these brain areas that are thought to also control our response to stress.

Professor Christian Templin, professor of cardiology at the university said: “For the first time, we have identified a correlation between alterations to the functional activity of specific brain regions and (takotsubo syndrome).”

Co-author Dr Jelena Ghadri said: “Emotions are processed in the brain so it is conceivable that the disease originates in the brain with top-down influences on the heart.”

More research is still needed to understand the exact link – particularly as the scientists didn’t have scans of the patients’ brains before they developed broken heart syndrome – so they couldn’t say whether there had been a decrease in communication caused by the syndrome or vice versa.

But CEO of Cardiomyopathy UK Joel Rose called the findings “an important piece of research”.