This story appeared in the May 2020 issue. Subscribe to Discover magazine for more stories like this.
Joanie Simpson arrived at the hospital by helicopter. She had intense chest pain — exhibiting the classic signs of a heart attack. Doctors immediately threaded a catheter into her heart, expecting to find blocked arteries that they would have to prop open with stents. Instead, they were startled to discover that her arteries were “crystal clear.”
Switching gears, the doctors quizzed Simpson about whether she’d had any unusual stress in her life. Sure enough, she cited a number of recent family and financial stressors. And, most devastating of all, she’d watched her dog, a pet that she’d loved and treated like a child, die a painful death the day before. She took it hard. So hard, in fact, that it interfered with the function of her heart muscle. It almost killed her.
In 2005, a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) confirmed that in some cases, an intense flood of stress hormones could stun the heart, essentially producing a heart attack. Just over a decade later, Simpson’s case was written up for NEJM as well, settling the debate over whether or not “broken heart syndrome” was real.
