A broken heart can inflict damage as lasting – and devastating – as a heart attack, study finds

If you’ve had a broken heart, you know it takes a while to overcome.

But once you you’ve moved on from the heartache, you’re stronger for it, right?

Not so fast, new research says: The most severe heartbreak — the kind triggered by emotional stress so debilitating it has a clinical name, Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or “broken heart syndrome” — can leave its victims with long-term heart damage, researchers at the University of Aberdeen in the United Kingdom found.

Researchers say broken heart syndrome’s effects are permanent, just like the damage left by a heart attack.

“Takotsubo is a devastating disease that can suddenly strike down otherwise healthy people,” Jeremy Pearson, a professor at King’s College London and the associate medical director at the British Heart Foundation, said in a statement.

And while medical research confirming the syndrome’s existence and digging into its causes has gotten stronger in recent years, this study published in the Journal of the American Society of Echocardiography helps establish that the impacts of “broken heart syndrome” can linger.

“We once thought the effects of this life-threatening disease were temporary, but now we can see they can continue to affect people for the rest of their lives,” Pearson said.

When a patient with the syndrome experiences an attack, he or she is actually suffering a weakening and ballooning of the heart muscle, severely impairing the heart’s all-important pumping capacity. Symptoms include chest pain and shortness of breath, according to Harvard Medical School, and it’s often induced by stress associated with sudden illness, losing a family member or a loved one, a serious accident or a natural disaster.

A Texas woman even suffered from the syndrome after her dog died in 2016, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“I was close to inconsolable,” Joanie Simpson, the woman from the study, told the Washington Post. “I really took it really, really hard.”

Past research has helped establish who is most likely to experience cases of Takostubo, with Harvard Medical School research concluding that 90 percent of reported cases of the syndrome occur in women between 58 and 75 years old.

The Aberdeen researchers completed the new study by following Takostubo patients for two years, monitoring their hearts with ultrasound and cardiac MRI scans that demonstrated their heart function was impacted well after the initial broken heart event, according to the British Heart Foundation.

Beyond that, researchers found, the patients experienced chronic heart failure symptoms — the kind you might expect in someone who had survived a heart attack. The new research was presented at an American Heart Association conference in Anaheim, Calif., this month, and was funded by the British Heart Foundation.

What’s also worrisome is the lack of a cure for the syndrome. Doctors used to believe full and quick recovery was possible, according to the British Heart Foundation, but this new research has cast doubts.

“There is no long-term treatment for people with Takotsubo because we mistakenly thought patients would make a full recovery,” Pearson said. “This new research shows there are long-term effects on heart health, and suggests we should be treating patients in a similar way to those who are at risk of heart failure."

This story was originally published November 16, 2017 at 1:54 PM with the headline "A broken heart can inflict damage as lasting – and devastating – as a heart attack, study finds."