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1. 00:01 Yes, Japanese scientists insist that you can die of a broken heart. In 1991, a group of four Japanese scientists, Doe, Sato, Hatayashi, and Ishihara published an article with a totally unpronouncable title. And in this article they described a new kind of
2. 00:28 cardiomyopathy disturbance or disorder of the heart and it came to be known as stress cardioopathy or takou syndrome. Takou is an interesting word. It has nothing to do with the heart. It comes from Japanese and he describes a trap for for an octopus because when the heart is
3. 00:53 affected by this condition, the left ventricle of the heart takes a shape that resembles a kind of round jar that the Japanese use to catch lobsters and octopuses. It was first described, as I said, in 1991. It's a syndrome and it occurs uh after a deep psychological, emotional
4. 01:16 or physical stress such as a divorce or heartbreak. Hence the broken heart syndrome. We've been aware of the broken heart syndrome for decades and yet we don't know. We have no idea what are the underlying processes. Probably it has something to do with
5. 01:36 catacolamines and excess of katakol sudden excess of katakolamines. Katakolamines are stress response um hormones. High levels of catakolamines create cause high blood pressure and this could lead to headaches, sweating, heart pounding and palpitations, pain in
6. 01:57 the chest, anxiety and even worse up to death. Catakolamines include uh hormones such as dopamine, epinephrine, adrenaline, and norepinephrine, noradrenaline, and so on. There's a new study out, and this is the reason for this video. And the study kind of
7. 02:16 reviews or cobbles together data from across the United States, and it gives us a new insight into the epidemiology and the outcomes of this very romantic sounding syndrome. First of all, women are much more likely to experience this syndrome, but men are much more likely
8. 02:38 to die from it, which proves of course that that men are much more romantic. Um, today um is a week the last week, it's about a week or 10 days ago, there was um Takotubo analysis published. There was an article in the journal of American Heart
9. 03:01 Association. It was authored by Muhammad Muahid of the University of Arizona and his colleagues. They use a database. There's a database called the National Inpatient Sample and they use this database and they took a sample from patients hospitalized around the nation.
10. 03:19 It's a weighted data data set. It doesn't have data from every hospitalization but individual patients in the data set can stand in for those who are not there and this allows you to estimate stuff like the total number of admissions for a diagnosis across the
11. 03:36 country and so on so forth. So what I'm trying to say it's pretty reliable. The researchers flagged admissions with a diagnosis code for this syndrome. They identified close to 40,000 individuals with the syndrome and they scaled it up to approximately
12. 03:56 200,000 US admissions between 2016 and 2020. That's 40,000 admissions per year in this single country. It's not a huge number. There's about half a million to 600,000 admissions per year for other types of myioardial inffections. But it's still a shocking number to think
13. 04:19 that 40,000 people a year in the United States alone are affected to that extent by the stress of events such as breakups, by heartbreak. That's pretty surprising, at least for me. As I said, women are much more likely to have this stress cardiomyopathy. 83% of
14. 04:44 all the cases were men and there is a slight increase in prevalence over time but nothing dramatic. So um one drawback of this study is that most of the data pertain to the period or some of the data pertain pertain to the period of the COVID pandemic or the onset of the COVID
15. 05:08 pandemic. Still women get this syndrome and men die of it. As I said men are more romantic. If we break down the incidents by age group you can see an interesting increase as people get older. there's a near doubling of the incidence of the risk after age
16. 05:28 45. So some people say that estrogen may play a protective role in this condition and as women lose this protection, they tend to experience heartbreak and other stressful situations via their hearts. Um we might be seeing an increase associated with menopause here and but
17. 05:49 this does not explain why men die of this syndrome much more than women. Majority of deaths are actually men. Um the authors compare outcomes among people hospitalized with this syndrome to outcomes of people hospitaliz patients hospitalized without the syndrome.
18. 06:11 And that seems to be a serious a big um
19. 06:17 uh control group. So there's a 12fold risk for cardiogenic
20. 06:26 shock compared with a general inpatient population. When you exper experience sudden stress such as breakup, your chances to experience cardiogenic shock are 12 times higher. That's that in itself is shocking. Individuals admitted to hospital with other types of heart
21. 06:45 disease or heart attack or whatever. Um were not analyzed that massively in the or that thoroughly in the study. So we are not quite clear as to what the syndrome contributes to endpoint results such as hospitalization and mortality and and so on so forth. 60
22. 07:07 6% of the patients with the syndrome died during admission. That's pretty high. That's unusually high because only 2.4% of people uh of patients in a typical hospital die. So that it's like a three-fold increase in the risk of mortality. Men with with this uh cardiomyopathy
23. 07:34 were more likely to die than women. As I said, men had an 11.2% mortality rate rate compared to 5.5% in women. In other words, 2/3 of the patients who died were men and this has also been increasing over time. There's no clear explanation for this
24. 07:52 discrepancy except possibly as I said some hormonal background. Men are more likely to develop the condition from physical as opposed to emotional stress. That might change the risk profile. No one knows. There is also the possibility that this is a kind of stubborn men
25. 08:09 phenomenon. Men might be less likely to go to a hospital. They experience symptoms. They feel bad, but they don't go to a hospital. They don't take medication. They don't go to a doctor because, you know, they're tough and what have you. And even when symptoms
26. 08:24 are mild, they can bring on the full onslaught of the syndrome. And the death, the mortality rate is shocking. 11.2% is very high. The paper raises many questions and affords or provides few answers like most of the papers since 1991. Um, however, there is a connection. It
27. 08:48 seems it establishes a connection between mind, emotions, and body. It's another brick in this mounting wall of evidence that our minds affect our bodies so profoundly that our minds can kill. If we experience stress, which is a psychological phenomenon, it could
28. 09:10 kill us. The connection is subjective, admittedly, not necessarily objective or ontological, but still it's there. The kubu cardiomyopathy is a a fatal disease potentially. So yes, it is for all the risks of a major uh heart attack and there's no convenient treatments,
29. 09:32 cardiac catheter um medication almost nothing seems to work. And so um stress seems to be um a fatality or mortality risk and we need to begin to tackle um stress much more thoroughly than we've done until now. We tend to think of stress as inevitable byproduct or side effect of
30. 10:03 living of life. But it's a it's very dangerous and it precipitates a multiplicity of diseases, not only this syndrome. And so the existence of a syndrome like this shows us demonstrates conclusively that stress can be toxic and fatal. None of us can live stressfree
31. 10:24 lives. I'm not saying that we can eliminate stress stress or remove stress from our lives but we must be aware of what stress does to us. We must be able to identify uh stress. We must be able to get in touch with our own emotions and bodily reactions. And when we must
32. 10:45 seek help the minute we um experience this kind of overwhelming stress coupled with initial mild symptoms. So I'm going to deal with stress in several videos. Um, I'm going to deal with the schwartza kol uh coping strategies. There are four of them. I'm
33. 11:12 going to analyze stress in a variety of other settings. Stress is a frequent visitors in relationships that involve abuse, especially narcissistic abuse.