Broken hearts and how to heal them

Just a generation ago, “grief” was an overused literary metaphor but not a true medical event. The first person to recognize this pathology was a Japanese cardiologist named Hikaru Sato. In 1990, Dr. Sato identified the curious case of a patient who showed symptoms of a heart attack even though her test was negative. He named it “Takotsubo syndrome” after noticing that the left ventricle of his heart had changed shape during the episode to resemble a takotsubo, a traditional octopus trap. A 2001 Japanese study not only confirmed Sato’s identification of a sudden cardiovascular event mimicking a heart attack, but also highlighted the common factor of emotional distress in these patients. It took 4,000 years for the medical profession to recognize what the poets had been saying all along: broken heart syndrome is real.