How a broken heart can break your heart

Grief linked to increased risk of cardiac arrest

‘Doctors need to be made aware’

IT has long been suspected that losing a loved one can break your heart.

Now scientists say people who suffer a psychological trauma are actually 64 per cent more likely to suffer from a heart attack or a stroke.

Stress caused by things like a bereavement or diagnosis of a life-threatening illness puts people at far greater risk of cardiovascular disease, a study has found.

Experts say it adds to growing evidence that severe stress reactions are linked to the development of certain illnesses.

Previous studies have mainly focused on post-traumatic stress disorder in people with military backgrounds, limiting the size and scope of data.

Instead, researchers used Swedish population and health registers to look at almost 137,000 people with diagnosed PTSD, acute stress reaction, adjustment disorder and other stress reactions.

They compared levels of cardiovascular disease to a similar number of siblings over a period of 26 years.

The findings, published in the British Medical Journal, show a stronger link between stress-related disorders and cases CVD which developed before the age of 50 – or early onset CVD.

The risk of severe CVD events, such as cardiac arrest, was particularly high in the first six months after being diagnosed with a stress-related disorder.

After a year, the greater risk becomes embolism and thrombosis – major blood clots – with those who are grieving being more than twice as likely to suffer from them as those who have not been diagnosed with a stress-related disorder.

Those affected by such trauma were also almost seven times more likely to suffer from heart failure within a year.

Results were similar for both men and women, scientists from the University of Iceland found. Doctors need to be aware of the link between stress-related disorders and a higher subsequent risk of cardiovascular disease, particularly during the months after diagnosis, according to the study’s authors.

They said: ‘These findings call for enhanced clinical awareness and, if verified, monitoring or early intervention among patients with recently diagnosed stress related disorders.’ However, the authors acknowledged that they could not rule out the influence of behavioural factors such as smoking status, alcohol consumption or obesity.

Heart and circulatory diseases cause a quarter of all deaths in the UK – over 150,000 deaths each year. And around 42,000 people under the age of 75 in the UK die from CVD each year.

Dr Katja Gehmlich, Associate Professor of Cardiovascular Science at the University of Oxford, said: ‘This elegant study highlights the importance of psychosociological factors for cardiovascular disease, especially for heart failure, a condition that puts a massive burden on health care systems.

‘Developing the idea of the study further, stress reduction may have promising long term benefits for cardiovascular disease.’