Medical mysteries A BROKEN HEART: THE DARK SIDE OF VALENTINE’S DAY

WRITER: FRED HILTON

Welcome to February. As far as months go, February is pretty much the pits. It’s cold — even in balmy Florida. Nobody, including the dictionaries, can agree on how to pronounce the name of the month. Is it feb-RU-ary, feb-U-ary, or even feb-wery? And there is also the business of not having enough days to be a real month. On the upside, February includes the birthdates of several great Americans. But the real high point of this much-maligned month comes on Feb. 14, St. Valentine’s Day. The day has been associated with romantic love since the Middle Ages, and today it is celebrated with a gazillion gushy Hallmark cards and tons of candy, flowers, and jewelry.

Sadly, however, Valentine’s Day does have its dark side — the broken heart. A broken heart can make you feel incredibly miserable but, frighteningly, it can also be fatal. We have all read about situations where one member of a long-married couple dies and then the other dies for no apparent reason within hours or days.

Although it is rare, the condition has earned its own name from the medical profession: broken-heart syndrome. It is “a name given by doctors who observed that it seemed to especially affect patients who had recently lost a spouse or other family member,” Ron Winslow wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “The mysterious malady mimics heart attacks, but appears to have little connection with coronary disease. Instead, it is typically triggered by acute emotion or physical trauma that releases a surge of adrenaline that overwhelms the heart. The effect is to freeze much of the left ventricle, the heart’s main pumping chamber, disrupting its ability to contract and effectively pump blood.”

The condition is also known as “stress cardiomyopathy” and “takotsubo.”

Japanese doctors noted the resemblance between a lobster trap called takotsubo and the affected heart’s shape on an X-ray.

Researchers have found that more than 90 percent of those affected by broken-heart syndrome are post-menopausal women. No reason for that has been determined women more vulnerable,” according to The Wall Street Journal. Some men and younger women have also been diagnosed with the syndrome, complicating the postmenopausal women theory.

So if you absolutely must break up with your significant other on Valentine’s Day, please be gentle. It could be fatal.

FRED HILTON spent 36 years as the chief public relations officer/spokesman for James Madison University in Virginia and 10 years prior as a reporter and editor for The Roanoke Times in Roanoke, Virginia. He is now happily retired in The Villages with his interior designer wife, Leta, their Cadillac Escalade golf cart, and their dog, Paris. (Yes, that makes her Paris Hilton).