I'm gonna tell a story about somebody dying from a broken heart
that sounds sort of like a Hollywood story and you don't really die from a broken heart right
maybe it's a heart attack maybe it's uh no this is real and it is not a heart attack
it's not where someone had plaque and the plaque released and it formed a clot you know the typical
heart attack yes that's the number one cause of death but there is a reality a medically known
thing it's actually called Takotsubo heart failure or cardiomyopathy heart
failure is obvious cardiomyopathy means heart muscle problem and yes that can happen from
a broken heart Takotsubo so that's obviously Japanese or it sounds Japanese and you might think
it was discovered by a Japanese doctor Takotsubo it is Japanese but there was not a Dr. Takotsubo
Takotsubo is an octopus trap what is dying from a broken heart got to do with an octopus trap
well actually it's got a lot to do with it and we'll talk about that in just a few minutes
first let's talk about the story the patient is a 70-year-old woman and this is a true story this
is not something I made up she's standing in the room of an ICU she's next to the bed where
her husband is lying the doctor comes in and the doctor says within the first 30 seconds he's dying
he won't survive the day there is nothing we can do he didn't think to ask what her perception of
of the illness was he didn't think to have her sit down he didn't think very much about the situation
so the next thing that happens is the patient collapsed to the floor she landed face forward
blood started flowing from her nose it appeared that the nose and a few teeth were broken but that
wasn't the biggest medical problem she had when you took her pulse it was very very weak it was
faint and she was barely breathing the patient and the husband both died within 24 hours so yes
the doctor was right about the husband but he had never predicted or thought about the patient dying
then as well and we hear stories about that where people tend to die when their loved one dies but
not usually that quickly we'll talk about that issue a little bit later but she had broken heart
syndrome as I said this is a known medical entity this is Penn Medicine they had a grand rounds on
this issue where they had an educational section on it and this is what it's got to do with octopus
pots so when you take a look at the normal heart the left ventricle which is the major pump
has more of a triangular shape usually in a normal heart but in the Takotsubo heart you get this
blunting it looks like the shape of a Japanese octopus pot so why do they have octopus traps
as you can guess they make sushi they eat octopods octopi whatever you call those things in plural
again what is Takotsubo cardiomyopathy cardio heart myo muscle pathos meaning bad
so the ventricle pump muscle stops working and as I said this is totally different from your
typical heart attack there's no plaque there's no clot causing this problem there's no loss of blood
flow it's still flowing to the ventricular muscle but there is heart failure there's loss of muscle
function and you may remember we talk about bio indicators chemical bio-indicators a lot troponin
is an indicator of loss of blood flow to the heart or strain to the heart muscle
troponin does go up so there are some theories that maybe this is loss of of circulation at a
micro-circulatory method the bottom line is we don't really know this is one of those things
in medicine where it happens we don't really understand how it happens but it is very powerful
most people will survive this it does happen in older people tends to happen more often in older
ladies if you start looking at the American Heart Association or cardiologist training tapes they
tend to talk about it's like a lot of things if you really start looking for it you find it a lot
the reason you don't find it or hear about it that often is people don't really look for it
now let's go back and talk about this patient was the timing and method of death I mean was
that good timing you know some people might say well you know what it saved her a lot of pain
we don't know that we don't know if it was best for her to die then we don't know if it was best
for the family it has been avoided well we don't know that we're sort of assuming that
had the doctor done his discussion differently it might have worked better we do know that the
doctor could have done better and we do know this broken hearts can kill thank you for your interest
so I'd like to talk with you a minute about the webinar people don't understand what the webinar
is it's actually a great way to get some access to health care that you're just not going to
get any other way you actually get the lab tests yourself for at a local lab a Quest lab near you
for the inflammation panel and the OGTT and the insulin survey these are things inflammation and
prediabetes that your doctor just does not know about and here's the thing Harvard health and many
others have said look sudden death is not always so sudden the Hollywood picture that it's evolved
out of the blue is not realistic it's more like real lightning preceded by clouds wind and rain
stop that metabolic storm before the lightning strikes and here's where that metabolic storm
comes from it's inflammation and it has to do usually with prediabetes so again we actually
get labs we go over them in the webinar and then you can start finding out how you can
prevent that heart attack others said that you couldn't even predict we can show you how thanks