Heart and emotions

It is well known that stress and strong negative emotions are detrimental to heart disease. Basically in intense emotional situations, and especially with chronic and prolonged stress, hormones (catecholamines) are released into the blood that cause cardiovascular changes (increased heart rate, increased blood pressure ...) which lead to an increase in cardiac work triggering or favoring myocardial infarction or angina pectoris.

• Strong negative emotions damage heart health and promote heart attack and angina pectoris.
• Women seem more vulnerable to heart problems caused by stress.
• The so-called broken heart syndrome is a clearly stress-related disease that affects women the most.

The role of stress

People who control their emotions well have better cardiovascular health. On the contrary, long-term excess stress increases cardiac risk by modifying stress hormones that contribute to the development of heart disease.

Thus, recent studies carried out promote the use of anxiolytic and antidepressant drugs in certain groups of patients with stable and known coronary disease to improve their heart condition by stabilizing their emotional situation.

More in women

Emotional stress has been seen to affect women to a greater degree than men. Several studies have shown that blood flow to the coronary arteries increases in the heart of men in situations of stress, while it remains the same in women. This causes that there is not enough blood supply to the heart of women, which encourages women to have greater heart problems after a stressful event or situation.

Finally, it has been seen that there is a clearly related to stress and whose most affected population are women.

Broken heart syndrome

The so-called Tako-Tsubo syndrome or stress cardiomyopathy (also known as broken heart syndrome) consists of a condition in which after a strong emotion (strong disgust, stressful situation, death of a relative ...) the patient suffers a series of symptoms similar to conventional myocardial infarction. These symptoms are reversible, since they are not due to a coronary problem but to the consequences of the release of large amounts of hormones (catecholamines) in the blood after a very strong emotion, thus the prognosis of the disease is good.

The release of these hormones results in transient heart weakness. Diagnostic studies show healthy coronary arteries, but repeated episodes of stress can re-trigger it.

This syndrome occurs preferably in postmenopausal women who do not have the classic cardiovascular risk factors (tobacco, high cholesterol, hypertension, etc.). Treatment is usually based on drugs that control or block the action of adrenaline.

Fundación MAPFRE offers you a guide that will help you expand all this information and learn how to prevent cardiovascular disease and recognize heart attack symptoms.