Joyful events — the birth of a child, a big win by your team — can trigger a dangerous condition called “broken heart syndrome,” doctors and researchers said yesterday.
Takotsubo syndrome, as it is also known, involves the sudden weakening of heart muscles, causing the left ventricle — the chamber which pushes oxygen-rich blood through the body — to balloon out abnormally at the bottom.
It has long been known that an unexpected emotional shock can provoke an attack.
However, statistics were lacking and no one had ever investigated whether an intensely happy event could give the same result.
In 2011, a pair of researchers in Switzerland — Christian Templin and Jelena Ghadri, both of University Hospital Zurich — set up a global registry to track cases of the syndrome, which is fairly rare.
Five years later, the network of 25 hospitals spread across nine countries had collected data on statistically significant 1,750 cases of the Takotsubo syndrome .
For the study, Templin and Ghadri, leading a team of 16 researchers, determined that emotional jolts were responsible for 485 of those cases.
And within that group, 4 percent — a total of 20 individuals — could be said to have suffered from “happy heart syndrome.”
The 20 cases set off by joyful events included a birthday party, a wedding, a surprise farewell celebration, a favorite rugby team winning a game and the birth of a grandchild, researchers said.
The condition — discovered by Japanese researchers — gets its name from a traditional Japanese octopus trap, which is said to resemble the distended heart chamber.
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