Grief Can Cause Heart Attack : Know Why?

It is amazing how physically painful grieving works. When in grief, your heart physically aches. A recollection triggers a knot in your stomach or a shudder down your spine. Some nights, your mind races, and your heart races with it, your body electrified with energy to the point that you cannot sleep. Other times, you are so sleepy that you immediately fall asleep, yet feel sleep deprived. You wake up the next morning fatigued and spend most of the day in bed.

Many people mistake sorrow for a single feeling, yet natural grieving is a powerful, varied, and often uncontrolled response that humans experience after a profoundly painful or traumatic event, such as the death of a loved one. Grief may have an emotional, physical, mental, and even spiritual impact on us. You feel pain both psychologically and physically while you are grieving. You may suffer a number of physical symptoms as part of the natural mourning reaction during this period. Heart attack is the most common physical impact that could possibly occur while going through a loss.

According to studies, the risk of a heart attack increases 21-fold within 24 hours following the death of a loved one. It can be incredibly difficult to accept that we will never see our loved ones again. It takes time and changes our brains.

Researchers at Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) discovered that on the first day after the loss of a cherished friend or family member, a person's chance of suffering a heart attack skyrockets to 21 times the standard. During the first week, the heart attack rate stays eight times higher than normal, but then gradually falls over the course of a month. The scientific basis for these findings is that powerful emotions can increase heart rate, blood pressure, and blood clotting propensity, all of which increase the chance of a heart attack.

Grief Can Cause Heart Attack

A 55-year-old woman died of a heart attack barely three minutes after learning of her younger sister's death in Vasapa village in the district's Kotturu mandal.

Garugubelli Anasuyamma, 55, and Mamidi Sanyasamma, 50, have been identified as the deceased siblings. Although the passing of the sisters cast a cloud over the two families, the townspeople were taken away by the sisters' kinship even in death. Even after their marriage, Anasuyamma had a close relationship with her younger sister Sanyasamma.

Anasuyamma and her husband went to Sanyasamma's residence on Friday to check on her sister. The two had a nice time. Sanyasamma's health, however, deteriorated while she was eating breakfast on Saturday morning.

On Saturday evening, she died while being transferred to Srikakulam from a private hospital in Kotturu. Anasuyamma, who was shocked by the news, couldn't endure the anguish of losing her sister and died of an apparent heart attack within minutes.

Hollywood star Debbie Reynolds died at the age of 84, only one day after her daughter's death- actress and author Carrie Fisher. Todd Fisher, her son, claimed his mother's final words were, 'I want to be with Carrie.' On December 23, 2016, Fisher had a major heart attack while flying from London to Los Angeles. Debbie Reynolds suffered a stroke the next day, unable to cope with the death of her child.

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