An explanation for the so-called 'broken-heart syndrome'
Thursday, April 8, 2010 - 09:49
in Health & Medicine
It seems an infarction, but it's not. It's called Tako-Tsubo syndrome, or stress-induced cardiomyopathy, and it's a rare disease which at first used to be confused with the far more common (and dangerous) cardiac infarction. Patients arrive to the emergency room with the characteristic heart attack symptoms: acute pain in the chest, an electrocardiogram with the typical changes and the release of those enzymes associated with the usual heart disease. Yet, as soon as a coronarography is performed, in order to discover the location where the occlusion preventing the blood reaching the heart was formed, nothing is found. In the infarction this occlusion causes a number of heart cells to die.