It’s never fun getting your heartbroken, but when it endangers the strength of your actual ticker you’ve got a bit of a bigger problem. While the Marvelettes comfortably sang “Too Many Fish in the Sea” in 1961, I’m not sure they were privy to a recent study.
Your heart doesn’t like it when you’re not happy
The finality that is death is one way to lose a partner, or experience heartbreak. But breakups can also cause physical changes in your heart and lend themselves to a problem whether it’s an irregular heartbeat or atrial fibrillation. Neither are temporary according to this recent Danish study.
This is nothing new, researchers have been studying the phenomenon for some time now and it’s likely better you simply join a monastery BEFORE someone hurts you either by their death or them simply walking out the door.
Stress cardiomyopathy, or broken heart syndrome, needn’t even have something “bad” to occur in order for it to be a real thing. Apparently, after years of supporting Chelsea, watching them win the Champion’s League a few years ago could have caused by heart serious harm.
Protect your heart, live life alone?
Essentially, you should just take Thorzine, for significant ups and downs are taxing on your ticker. For many, these emotional moments contribute to something called “Broken Heart Syndrome,” and it’s not good. Not good at all.
The research, which was recently published in the journal Open Heart, looked at 88,600 Danes in the national registry and found that those who lost a partner (for whatever reason) were over 40% more likely to see atrial fibrillation occurring within a month of loss than those who hadn’t lost anyone and experienced atrial fibrillation of their own.
Getting through the month didn’t help that much either according to the research. Those that lost someone dear to them faced a greater risk of the same condition for roughly a year. Somewhat surprisingly, this loss and its link to heart issues occurred more frequently in younger people. This was magnified by death and exponentially magnified by an accidental or unexpected death.
“This study adds evidence to the growing knowledge that the mind-heart link is a powerful association and further examination is warranted,” says study author Simon Graff, a researcher in the Department of Public Health at Aarhus University. “Broken heart syndrome is a different disease with a whole other pathology, but some of the pathophysiological mechanisms might be the same. [Like] surges in hormones that facilitates inflammation and imbalance in the uncontrollable parts of our central nervous system.”
