According to a recent Danish study, your heart suffers when you’re not happy. The death of a life partner may trigger an irregular heartbeat, causing the risk of dying from a broken heart.
Unless you’re dead inside, you’ve probably experienced the pain of heartbreak. You may at some point even felt that it was actually tearing apart your body and soul to the point of almost killing you.
But even breakups can cause physical changes in your heart and lend themselves to a problem from irregular heartbeat to atrial fibrillation, according to the Danish study.
Data from nearly one million Danish people has been investigated and showed an elevated risk of developing a heart flutter, lasting about a year. Those under 60 whose partners died unexpectedly were most in peril.
The study reveals that the risk was highest 8 – 14 days after the loss, after which it gradually declined. After a year it was going back to normal. “One year after the loss, the risk was almost the same as in the non-bereaved population,” the study claims.
But this is nothing new. Researchers have been studying this phenomenon for years, but the mechanism has been unclear. However, the Danish researchers have collected data from 88,600 Danes between 1995 and 2014 to search for a link. The study looked at several factors that might increase the risk of the heart issue, including age and sex, underlying health conditions and the health of the partner.
“The risk of developing an irregular heartbeat for the first time was 41% higher among those who had been bereaved than it was among those who had not experienced such a loss,” said the study, which was led by Simon Graff in the Department of Public Health at Aarhus University.
He continues, “This study adds evidence to the growing knowledge that the mind-heart link is a powerful association and further examination is warranted. Broken heart syndrome is a different disease with a whole other pathology, but some of the pathophysiological mechanisms might be the same, e. g. surges in hormones that facilitates inflammation and imbalance in the uncontrollable parts of our central nervous system.”
As mentioned above, this isn’t just something that affects older people. The fact is that those under 60 were more than twice as likely to develop problems after losing their partner. If it happens unexpectedly, that increases the odds by up to 57 per cent.
So, you better be warned. You may either let the cause walk out of the door or join a monastery before someone hurt you.
The study was recently published in the online journal Open Heart.
Broken Heart Syndrome May Cause Death, written by Tor Kjolberg