The heartbreak of grief

Excerpt from "How Grief Can Break Your Heart," Time, by Alice Park. January 10, 2012--Grief is a powerful emotion, and the latest research shows just how damaging it can be, especially for the heart. The sobering results, appearing in the journal Circulation, are the first to compare how grief affects an individual’s heart-disease risk within a period of time. Previous studies have documented that people losing loved ones tend to have more heart problems than those who aren’t bereaved. In the current analysis, lead author Elizabeth Mostofsky and her colleagues took a unique approach by calculating an individual’s “average loss” of loved ones over a year, by asking how many people study participants had lost in the past year and comparing that figure to the number of loved ones that same person lost during the study period in question, which included the most recent day and week preceding a heart attack.

“We compared these patients’ losses in the recent past of the last day or week before their heart attack to the loss we would have expected to see based on their loss [pattern] over the past six months,” says Mostofsky. “People who have a heart attack are more likely to have lost a person in the recent past than would have been expected based on the number they lost over the past six months to a year.”

That’s not really surprising, but the extent of grief’s effect on the heart was more eye opening. Losing someone raises the risk of having a heart attack the next day by 21-fold, and the risk of a heart attack in the following week by six times. The apparently broken hearts showed signs of mending after about a month, when risk of heart attacks started to decline.
The findings only heighten the need to better understand the myriad ways that grief can affect the body and mind, from changing blood pressure to altering blood-vessel chemistry so clots are more likely to both form and rupture, leading to a heart attack. The emotional distress from a loss can also cause the bereaved to change their lifestyle and either stop taking medications that help their heart or give up on behaviors such as exercising and eating a healthy diet that can keep them healthy as well.

CMDA Cardiologist and CMDA Member Eugene Smith, MD: "The loss of someone close can rend our emotions, steal our pleasure and empty our spirit. The effects ripple through the entirety of our being and are felt by our bodies. Crying, anorexia, sleeplessness and anhedonia are a few of these manifestations. The study by Mostofsky underscores the severity of this bodily effect by demonstrating a marked increase in myocardial infarction at the onset of bereavement.

"Such information highlights some important truths. First is our interconnectedness. We are social creatures. It is not good for man to be alone. God exists in a community (Father, Son and Spirit) and intends for His creation to live in community. When that community loses a member, the loss impacts the entire group. Our presence (or our absence) affects those around us.

"Second is the interaction of body and spirit. Christians recognize that man is more than material, but perhaps we give considerably less thought to the interaction between the material and non-material: they are not dissociated. What we do with our bodies influences our emotion and our spiritual health; alternatively, our emotions and our spirit influence bodily health. A growing body of medical literature shows that grief, anger, anxiety, depression, isolation, social stressors, marital dissatisfaction and even an unforgiving spirit change our physiology and worsen clinical outcomes. To fully address our patient’s physical health, we must consider the psychological, social and spiritual issues confronting them.

"At a time when medicine seems dominated by technologic solutions and squeezed by economic concerns, the Christian physician must remember that the true source of healing is the power of Christ. Our patients need not only our pills and procedures, but also our presence and our commitment to minister to the whole person."