The coronavirus pandemic could be leading to more broken hearts, literally. Researchers have been tracking the surge in Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or “broken heart syndrome,” noticing even before the pandemic that the stress-induced condition strikes women more than men.
“It feels like a heart attack. In severe cases they’re in shock…but it turns out the majority of the time the arteries providing the blood to the heart muscle are open, so it’s not really a heart attack, the heart muscle is stunned and dysfunctional,” said Dr. Noel Bairey Merz.
Merz, the director of the Barbra Streisand Heart Center at Cedars-Sinai, joined KNX In Depth to discuss the heart-brain disorder and its increase in female patients.
“It is considered a stress-related trigger that is [happening in patients that are] over 90% women,” Merz said.
“The majority are emotional stress from illness, death of a loved one…but in men, which is not as often reported, it’s more often physical stressors.”
The cases were on the rise before the pandemic struck, but Merz said numbers increased quickly as the emotional two years of death, job loss and overall chaos unfolded. While she hopes to learn more about why it’s happening and how to treat it, Merz told KNX she hopes the pandemic will soon stop providing doctors with cases to study.
While the syndrome is rare, Merz said an important reason to study it is that once it occurs — there’s a risk of recurrence.
“It has anywhere from a 10 to 20% recurrence rate so we would like to prevent that because each one of these episodes can be life threatening,” she said.
“Up to half, particularly the women, will have what we call long term effects. They will report fatigue, shortness of breath, effort intolerance…even though the heart pumping function appears normal, in our cardiac MRI and our sophisticated imaging at Cedars Sinai, we’re detecting that in fact that heart muscle is not normal.”
A recent study out of the Smidt Heart Institute found two causes for concern as the disorder relates to women, according to Cedars Sinai.
First, as Merz suggested, it can lead to long-term heart injury. Second, it’s occurring 10 times more often in middle-aged and older women.
“We hope with these future studies to be able to identify the nature of the damage,” Merz said. “And start to talk about things that can improve it.”
To read more about Merz' work at Cedars Sinai, click here.
LISTEN on the Audacy App
Sign up and follow Audacy
Facebook | Twitter | Instagram