Can you die from a "broken heart"?

[Mr Rayon]

Is it true that a person can die from a "broken heart"?

[ewmon]

Nawh ... it just feels that way (unless someone did what Charles Boyer did after when his wife died).

[SMF]

I can probably come up with some scheme by which someone could fall down and break their heart. SM

[random]

This should likely be in the psychology section but yes I believe so. We have very strong emotional needs, as anyone who has been through it knows having your heart broken can be traumatic and lead to self destructive behaviour. The Stress from the loss causes lack of appetite, severe depression, possible chronic addictions ........well you get the point. It's not the loss that will kill you it's how you react to the stress of the situation and if your body can endure it.

 

During mine I starved myself, never slept, drank enormous amounts of caffeine ( no joke 40 cups a day) and smoked 4 packs a day, I lost 50 lb's and gained a recurrent psychotic mental illness. Quite possibly if I had not been institutionalized I would be dead.

[Mr Skeptic]

Mental state can contribute to wellness or sickness. But I think "brokenhearted" would at most be a contributing factor.

[random]

Mental state can contribute to wellness or sickness. But I think "brokenhearted" would at most be a contributing factor.

 

 

I have to disagree, To label it as a contributing factor when it is the only factor leading to the sickness/ self destructive behaviour minimalizes the reason behind the person's declining health.

 

"he's sick because he won't eat"

 

"he's sick because he hasn't slept in day's"

 

"he's sick because he's an alcoholic"

 

Those are contributing factors the reason behind them, The actual sickness is the broken heart, Feel free to call it chronic depression if that would be acceptable.

 

Dying of a broken heart is common terminology for the depression that sets in after the loss of a significant other, Such as 2 elders in a nursing home.......1 dies...........a week later the other 1 follows..........is the depression a contributing factor to the death or is it the only factor? Quite likely without the depression and stress that accompanies it the person would have lived much longer.

[lemur]

I'm not sure if this is a contribution or a diversion from the thread topic, but I think that a "broken heart" is actually a fight-or-flight adrenaline-impetus response that is especially problematic in that the only thing to fight or flee from is loss, which can only be fought or fled from by regaining the thing lost. So when that thing is either a living thing that died or a person who no longer wants you to "regain" them, it short-circuits the feedback-response mechanism, I think. This could be why people flee into drugs or other addictions, or seek rebound relationships or other surrogate emotional objects. I.e. This gives them a sense that they are combatting the thing that is threatening to harm/destroy them. I know it sounds odd to call loss something "threatening to harm/destroy" someone but if you think about it, that is the way your psyche interprets it because whatever it is you had before you lost it (e.g. relationship) was something you experienced as supportive of your various life activities. This would be as true for losing a job or means of income as for losing a friend, life partner, child as they become more independent, or your car keys (though I don't know how often that one causes heart-break - maybe a different story if the car was stolen). Heart-break can be very intense but I think it's a perfect form of torture because I don't think you can die from it except as a result of your own self-destructive reaction, depending on how far you take it.

[Marat]

If on clinical grand rounds you actually take the time to talk to patients and find out about their backgrounds, as well as what they were experiencing during the period just before they became sick, you almost always find that something psychologically very damaging occurred just before their presentation with their disease. This is curious, since the actual disease process is often of a nature which in theory should not be influenced through psychological processes, yet still the correlation is undeniable. For example, in a renal ward on new endstage renal disease patients there were present simultaneously a patient whose wife had just died, a patient whose long-term girlfriend had just dumped him, an old man who had been devastated by finding his car windows all smashed when he left the funeral of a good friend, a man whose grandson had just died at a freak accident at an amusement park, and a man who had just been divorced. This seems like more than the normal concentration of unfortunate life events just prior to renal failure, yet in theory there is nothing psychological that can directly cause renal damage, unless it is hypertension, but that takes years to have its effect. The action of psychology on immunity might play a role in some of these cases, but even this link is fairly unclear.

[PhDwannabe]

Can you die of a broken heart? Well, several people are touching on my answer already, but hopefully I'll flesh it out a bit more and add something to the discussion:

 

Depends on exactly how proximal of a cause we're talking about here. Medical examiners frequently list more than one cause of death because a chain of factors is frequently identifiable behind many mortality states. Many of the common ones are relatively distal--for instance, in this sense we might say that nobody really "dies of cancer," you die because eventually, you get pneumonia and your lungs fill up with fluid, or you stop eating, use up all of your electrolytes, and your heart stops beating. (If you want to be a little droll about it, I once heard a doctor say that there's basically one cause of death: cerebral hypoxia.)

 

So, can a person die of a broken heart? Sure. As much as they can die of this thing called "cancer." Like cancer, a broken heart can kill with varying degrees of proximity to the mortality itself. In the most distal sense, we might imagine drinking yourself into lethal liver failure after your wife leaves you. There are a lot of mediators between the broken heart and death there. Psychoneuroimmunology has a lot to tell us about how chronic stressors do nasty things to the immune system, and can make all sorts of infections and other dangers more likely.

 

Most proximally, however, what you're probably looking for is stress-induced cardiomyopathy. The burst of catecholemines from an emotionally (or sometimes physically, or as is often the case, both) stressful trigger sets of a cascade of changes in the heart muscle sometimes leading to failure. Often, of course, this event gains its lethality from its superimposition on pre-existing morbidity, but you can say the exact same thing of a plain old, garden-variety heart attack.

 

So, should we call it a "contributing factor?" What is a broken heart's status, exactly, as a "cause?" There are questions like this spread all over medicine and psychology. It's something of a philosophical issue; something statistics can't really fully inform us on. Statistics have a maddening and persistent tendency to come out as numbers, and not nice terms like "contributing factor." I hope that doesn't upset you too much. Or, if it does, I hope you've got a good cardiologist.

[lemur]

If on clinical grand rounds you actually take the time to talk to patients and find out about their backgrounds, as well as what they were experiencing during the period just before they became sick, you almost always find that something psychologically very damaging occurred just before their presentation with their disease. This is curious, since the actual disease process is often of a nature which in theory should not be influenced through psychological processes, yet still the correlation is undeniable. For example, in a renal ward on new endstage renal disease patients there were present simultaneously a patient whose wife had just died, a patient whose long-term girlfriend had just dumped him, an old man who had been devastated by finding his car windows all smashed when he left the funeral of a good friend, a man whose grandson had just died at a freak accident at an amusement park, and a man who had just been divorced. This seems like more than the normal concentration of unfortunate life events just prior to renal failure, yet in theory there is nothing psychological that can directly cause renal damage, unless it is hypertension, but that takes years to have its effect. The action of psychology on immunity might play a role in some of these cases, but even this link is fairly unclear.

That's interesting. Is there some way that stress could influence metabolism in a way that would result in less clean metabolism? I could only relate this to some other combusting system whose ratios of fuel, oxygen, temperature, exhaust flow, burn-chamber dynamics, etc. would be drastically altered resulting in unburned fuel and other impurities that would unduly tax any cleaning/filtering systems that keep it clean.

 

 

 

[Stefan-CoA]

Well, a broken heart is a situation of extreme stress.

 

So you've got all the stress hormones pumping through your system (glucocorticoids specifically) which suppress the immune system, increase heart-rate and blood pressure (decrease appetite, I think) and basically activate all the mechanisms one would need for a "flight or fight" response, except this condition is spread over a much longer time.

 

I can only assume that this would lead to detrimental effects on the body as a whole. Also there is the concept of "wille zum leben". If you lose that, the drive to live, one could speculate on psychosomatic effects of wishing/wanting to be dead.

 

I'm barely out of undergrad though, so take what I say with a pinch of salt

[Ch_Rcc]

I have to second Stefan's answer. You can't die from a "broken heart," at least in a literal sense. However, the heart muscle has to work harder with more stress, making yourself more perceptible to a heart attack or something along those lines. Although, I have to admit that it's an interesting topic.

[Athena]

I have to second Stefan's answer. You can't die from a "broken heart," at least in a literal sense. However, the heart muscle has to work harder with more stress, making yourself more perceptible to a heart attack or something along those lines. Although, I have to admit that it's an interesting topic.

 

This sounds like a scientifically correct statement. However, after knowing stress can cause the elderly to die, I don't really care about the science of it. I just want to say, yes, an important loss can cause a person to die of a broken heart. It is not uncommon for couples to die within one year of each other. I have heard of grandparents dying when the state took their children from a parent and would not allow the grandparent to have the children, because I am a gerontologist and worked on getting the law changed in Oregon. Another elderly man died when the city took the house he had built with his own hands, because he refused to pay for a newly installed sewage line in the street, that he didn't intend to use.

 

However, if you are a healthy young person, you probably won't die, even if you might wish you would, and years later, you will think it was silly to have been so upset.

[Marat]

What about cases of South Pacific aboriginals who, after seeing certain signs which they interpret as implying their imminent demise, become catatonic, suffer depression of respiration, heart rate, and blood pressure, and then quickly die? Melville's novel 'Moby Dick' reports such a case, but anthropologists have confirmed the reality of this phenomenon. Interestingly, guinea pigs that have been badly shocked can also become completely immobile and die under similar circumstances. I'm not sure what is the exact mechanism of death in either case, however.

[PhDwannabe]

Melville's novel 'Moby Dick' reports such a case, but anthropologists have confirmed the reality of this phenomenon

Do you have a reference? Besides Moby Dick, obviously.

[The Peon]

My aunt died of lung cancer when she was 56 from smoking. My uncle was healthy and only 59 and died suddenly a year later. Relatives said he was severely depressed and had no will to live. I am sure there were contributing factors that stemmed from the depression.

[rktpro]

If a brokenheart means that your pacemaker has damaged or something then you can.

Broken heart is not a condition directly related to heart but to brain. Though, it affects the heart too. Under stress, the blood pressure can fall down.

If the heart is broken by a unfulfilled desire or by loss of a means of happiness, then it can only make stress. It can lead a person to commit suicide or something but it won't make a lot of physical damage or damage to metabolism.

[Basi]

I think people are analyzing a simple question too much. Can you die directly from depression? No. Can you die indirectly from depression (increased sympathetic activity, decreased immune function, etc.)? Yes.

[Ahsan Iqbal]

If you are a south-asian, you must have watched Indian television dramas. One thing that is common to all of them is that whenever an old man faces some emotional stress, he suffers from a myocardial infarction, generally known as the Heart Attack. So if these stories are right, which they are in some sense (if we can ignore the exaggeration), a broken heart can lead to emotional stress which can elicit a number of responses that may ultimately lead to death. The most common of these is the Hear Attack, as I mentioned earlier.

There is another interesting point in this. Let me ask the starter of this topic, Has heart anything to do with feelings? If no, then why people call it "broken heart" instead of "broken mind" or something else. The possible answer is that it is called broken heart because the psychological responses resulting from the situation most commonly affect the heart. In serious cases, they might even cause the heart attack, which may ultimately lead to death.

[Jack Logan]

In fact there is a condition called “Broken heart syndrome”, caused by sudden emotional stress like a breakup, that produces heart muscle weakness (so a heart broken is not just a methaphor) and symptoms that could lead you (and maybe a doctor) to think you are suffering a heart attack. It is severe, very dangerous because it really would kill you, but reversible. If you are interested read more on this at: http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/press_releases/2005/02_10_05.html

 

 

[Ahsan Iqbal]

I am not sure about death but I have heard people getting a heart attack because of increased emotions (sad emotions obviously). And there is a medical reason behind it. You would know the role of sympathetic nervous system in human body. The sympathetic fibers that go to the heart tend to increase its rate of beating. And emotional stress causes an increase in sympathetic activity. Like when you are emotional, you can't sleep, you would move around purposelessly, your sleep will fly away and all that stuffy. It is all due to increased sympathetic activity.

 

If the subject has some problem in the blood supply to heart, the increased heart rate won't be paralleled by increase in heart's blood supply, which would result in damage to muscles of heart and ultimately heart attack.

 

And to end: everyone knows that heart attacks can be fatal (and they are fatal in many cases). So indirectly, broken heart can kill you but only if your heart is very weak.

[kitkat]

This is the same analogy when people said during the 1918 flu epidemic that the "flu" caused death when in reality it was the different reactions as in secondary infections that finally put the nail in the coffin. The broken heart is the origin and it is dependent on how you respond to it which if negative will ripple into health problems or destructive behavior but in the end your death certificate will not say you died from a broken heart.

 

I know of a dog once who its companion another dog got hit by a car and it died a year later from a tumor that developed. I know this dog was very depressed over the lost of its companion and I think it opened the door for health problems to evolve rapidly is why he died a year later.

[kitkat]

This is the same analogy when people said during the 1918 flu epidemic that the "flu" caused death when in reality it was the different reactions as in secondary infections that finally put the nail in the coffin. The broken heart is the origin and it is dependent on how you respond to it which if negative will ripple into health problems or destructive behavior but in the end your death certificate will not say you died from a broken heart.

 

I know of a dog once who its companion another dog got hit by a car and it died a year later from a tumor that developed. I know this dog was very depressed over the lost of its companion and I think it opened the door for health problems to evolve rapidly is why he died a year later.

[Appolinaria]

I've heard of baby elephants dying of a broken heart when their mother or human caregiver leaves them

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2012275/I-broke-baby-elephant-s-heart-Daphne-Sheldrick-dedicated-life-elephants-s-learned-hard-way-really-forget.html

Edited October 28, 2011 by Appolinaria