Reynolds and Fisher: When a Broken Heart Kills

Dec. 30--It sounded like an ending too unbelievable for even Hollywood: Famed actress Debbie Reynolds died just one day after she'd lost her celebrity daughter, 60-year-old Carrie Fisher.

The 84-year-old performer reportedly suffered a stroke Wednesday. The official cause of death hasn't yet been disclosed, though Reynolds' son, Todd Fisher, told the Associated Press that his sister's death "was too much" for his mother: "She said, 'I want to be with Carrie.' And then she was gone."

The dramatic turn had fans across the world wondering: Can you die from a broken heart? The phrase dates back thousands of years, describing a feeling of loss as universal as love itself, but in recent decades researchers have uncovered a medical explanation.

It's called broken-heart syndrome, and it can be fatal, said Dr. Rohan Wagle, a cardiologist at Kelsey-Seybold Clinic in Houston. Wagle didn't want to speculate about what happened to Reynolds, but he said the publicized description is consistent with the condition, also called stress-induced cardiomyopathy.

"It's basically a syndrome where a patient experiences a traumatic or a highly emotional event, it causes a surge of adrenalin that becomes sort of toxic to the heart muscle and actually causes the heart muscle to pump less efficiently," Wagle said. "That leads to a situation similar to a heart-failure patient, but happening in a very sudden fashion."

Patients suffering from broken-heart syndrome usually show up at an emergency room believing they'd suffered a heart attack, said Dr. Salim Virani, an associate professor of cardiology at Baylor College of Medicine, explaining that the condition was first described in 1990 by Japanese researchers. They named it Takotsubo syndrome, because the left ventricles of patients who suffer from it are puffed up, resembling the shape of Takotsubo pots used to catch octopuses in Japan.

Symptoms are indeed similar to a heart attack -- chest pain, shortness of breath -- but the similarities end there, Virani said. The condition doesn't involve a heart blockage, he said, and most patients recover within days or weeks, with minimal lasting harm.

In rare cases, when other underlying health problems are at play, the condition can be deadly.

Any emotional trauma can trigger broken-heart syndrome, said Virani, who published a study on the topic a decade ago. The death of a loved one. A bad break-up. Financial stress.

It's widely believed that those emotional traumas trigger a hormonal release that affects the heart, but after years of study, "the truth is we really don't know for sure," said Virani, who has treated a number of these cases at DeBakey VA Medical Center.

The vast majority of broken-heart patients -- up to 80 or 90 percent -- are women, raising questions about the differences in the way men and women process emotions. Researchers haven't been able to explain the disparity, Wagle said.

In the past five years, he said he's seen about 10 cases, including one that seemed to be triggered by excessive energy drink consumption. In another case, a woman came in a couple weeks after her cat died.

"She recovered," he said.

To prevent the condition, doctors say people who are grieving should surround themselves with supportive loved ones and try to stay active. The most important thing is to find ways to stay calm and relieve stress, Wagle said.

The condition is relatively rare, though it's often erroneously mentioned in news accounts when an elderly couple dies within hours or days of each other. In most of those cases, Wagle said, another physiological phenomenon is at play: People who are already ill simply lose the will to keep fighting after losing a cherished companion.

In an interview with NPR last month, Carrie Fisher spoke of her admiration for Reynolds, noting that her mother had recently suffered some health troubles. Stress in general can also play a role in strokes.

Whatever the cause, Reynolds' death is a reminder of the devastating toll grief can take on the body.

"I think the brain and the heart are definitely connected," Wagle said. "You see it in a lot of stories of patients."

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