Scientists have charted for the first time how intense stress caused by bereavement can make someone "die of a broken heart".
A British team has found that the regions of the brain responsible for learning, memory and emotion can destabilise the cardiac muscle of someone who already has heart disease.
When we are under stress, these "higher regions" of the brain take part in a vicious circle of activity which can trigger harmful rhythms, researchers say.
While it has always been suspected that emotional problems could put the heart under pressure, this was believed to have been caused by "primitive" brain regions, such as the brain stem sending messages to heart tissue. Bereavement has been one such unexplained problem.
The discovery of a new relationship between heart and brain reveals how irregular cardiac rhythms are triggered, which can lead to sudden death in patients with underlying conditions.
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