Broken Heart Syndrome: Why It’s Real and How to Heal

Lynne Cox’s mastery of mind over matter rivals that of any fire walker. The champion open-water swimmer trained her body to keep warm in the harshest of conditions. At age 15, she was the youngest and fastest person to cross the English Channel. More recently, she swam a mile among the icebergs in Antarctica, sans wetsuit. “It was as if I had been given magical powers,” Cox writes of her ability to stave off hypothermia in her new memoir, Swimming in the Sink.

Cox’s astonishing mind-body connection, however, also proved to have a destructive side. In 2012, after suffering the loss of both her parents, Cox, then 55, began to feel exhausted and experienced difficulty breathing. A cardiologist confirmed that her heart had gone into atrial fibrillation. The amount of blood her heart was pumping was consistent with somebody dying. Cox was prescribed medication and told she might need a heart transplant. Only six months later did experts examine an echocardiogram and determine that she wasn’t suffering heart failure. Instead, she had broken heart syndrome, a condition that mimics a heart attack and can be brought on by extreme emotions such as anger, grief, stress—even joy.

Broken heart syndrome was first identified 25 years ago by Japanese researchers who named it takotsubo cardiomyopathy, after the Japanese word for an octopus trap, which the heart’s lower left ventricle resembles when it balloons out during a stress-induced attack (the condition is also called stress-induced cardiomyopathy). It tends to affect postmenopausal women; a recent study showed 6,230 cases were reported in the U.S. in 2012. Those suffering it usually experience sudden, intense chest pain and difficulty breathing, and are often told they’ve had a heart attack because symptoms and heart rhythm test results are similar. But the difference is massive: Those who suffer broken heart syndrome show no evidence of blocked arteries, and typically recover within weeks.

Cox was thrilled to hear her revised diagnosis. Her doctors prescribed beta blockers to manage the heart’s rhythm, as was the norm until recently. New research suggests the syndrome is the result of an impaired parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for helping the body calm down, and doctors are now looking into the healing and preventative powers of mindful breathing and yoga.

For Cox, a renewed focus on the mind-body connection has made all the difference. She practices mindful meditation and supplements her swimming practice with regular hikes, and her heart has been showing steady improvement—in more ways than one. “It’s healed enough,” she says, “to fall in love.”

 

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