How A Broken Heart Affects Your Body

Grief is not just in your head—where there are emotions there are neurotransmitters, where there are neurotransmitters there are systemic effects, and that’s without getting started on the behavioral changes that can impact health.

And yes, one can die of it:

At the heart of the matter

Studies of older couples have found that the surviving spouse’s risk of death can increase by up to 90% during the first 3 months after their partner dies, with some couples dying only days or weeks apart.

There are various possible reasons: severe grief and depression are linked to higher levels of inflammatory proteins, which may weaken your immune system, while depression can also make it harder to maintain everyday health habits

It can also be possible that the longing to be with one’s partner has a logical direction to take, when one’s beloved is dead (writer’s note: as a widow, I know that feeling, and in the worst of my grief it was stronger than I care to put into words, but I also had an important reason to live, hence still being around to write about it).

Back to more biological threats, sometimes even they can be quite dramatic: takotsubo cardiomyopathy, also called stress cardiomyopathy or broken heart syndrome, is a condition in which intense emotions can directly threaten your life; Japanese doctors first described the condition in 1990, naming it after a Japanese octopus trap because the left ventricle balloons into a similar shape. It then fills with pooled blood and expands, reducing its ability to pump blood effectively.

For that one, postmenopausal women appear to be at the greatest risk, likely because of declining estrogen levels, since estrogen is cardioprotective.

Most people survive it, but it has around a 5% incident rate of (usually fatal) cardiac arrest.

For more on all of this, enjoy:

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You might also like:

What Grief Does To Your Body (And How To Manage It) ← our own main feature on this topic

Take care!