Heartbreak cardiomyopathy

This month I had a patient with an interesting and rare condition called TakoTsubo Cardiomyopathy, also known as "broken heart syndrome." It involves myocardial stunning after a highly stressful event such as the death of a spouse or a natural disaster. Basically, you are so overwhelmed that you literally go into heart failure. The physiologic mechanism is incompletely understood, but leading theories revolve around catecholamine release. Thankfully, the significant majority of people recover their full heart function in days to weeks. It is most commonly seen in Japanese post-menopausal women, however it has been described in the US and Europe as well. It can be accompanied by an NSTEMI (heart attack) and frequently QT prolongation (repolarization abnormality - sorry, I don't know how to translate that better without a tutorial on EKGs).

It gets its name from Japanese octopus traps. Why? Because this particular heart failure displays what we call "apical ballooning." Basically, the upper and middle parts of the ventricle contract, but the apex (the point) of the heart does not. That means that blood, which is ordinarily squeezed from the bottom of the heart towards the top, is now being simultaneously pushed up and down. the down-going blood has nowhere to go so the tip of the heart balloons out (see diagram).

My patient began recovering heart function very quickly, but her QT prolongation was impressive. Almost write-it-up-in-a-journal impressive. Thankfully, that also resolved quickly. We never got a good sense of what her precipitating event was, but I suppose all stress is relative.