The nightmare began in 1996 when Sally Clark's 11-week-old baby, Christopher, was found dead in his Moses basket. Sally and her husband, Steve, both attorneys from Essex, England, decided to have another child. Fourteen months later, baby Harry, 8 weeks old, collapsed in his bouncy chair and died. Sally Clark was accused of killing her babies and summarily thrown in jail. While facing trial for murder, she discovered she was pregnant; that child was taken from her and placed in foster care. Clark was convicted of murder based on faulty testimony and handed two life sentences. The wheels of justice finally turned, and in 2003, Clark was released from prison while the doctor who put her away had his theories discredited and his medical license stripped. Back at home, the barrister found normal life difficult. Suffering bouts of depression, mood swings, and nightmarish memories of her time in jail, she barely left the house. Then, this past March, at age 42, Sally Clark died suddenly of natural causes, officials said.
"She died of a broken heart," her friends told the tabloids, which had covered the Clark saga from the start. Though the exact cause of death is still under investigation, the idea that someone might succumb to prolonged stress and grief has always been provocative. Is it possible? The popular belief has gotten some hefty backup from scientists studying the link between the heart and mind. While not all negative thoughts and feelings are bad for health, specific emotional states, especially stress and depression, have now been linked to heart troubles of all kinds. Evidence is overwhelming that the heart takes a beating after psychic trauma like Clark's, but lesser insults may do us in as well. A bad marriage, an angry or abusive boss, a mugging in the park—all increase risk of heart disease, a bounty of evidence shows. Personality factors like extroversion and optimism can positively impact the cardiovascular system and the health of the heart, while anger and stress can damage the heart and the mind. Some forms of heart disease even trigger the same chemistry found in depression and stress.
In the last couple of years, our understanding of the connection between heart and mind has gathered enormous nuance, detail, and depth. We've long connected depression and anger with heart ailments, but new findings suggest that even mild forms of these states can place us at risk. Other studies now trace the relationship between heart and mind to our days in the womb. We are now identifying the personality types and temperaments that make some people so vulnerable to heart trouble, and we've learned it's not just extreme stress or fear, but also work-related repetition and boredom—often referred to as burnout—that puts us at risk. Finally, we are gaining profound new insight into the biology behind the links: For the first time, researchers are getting to the bottom of the inflammatory process that drives depression, stress, and heart disease—as well as the feedback loops that keep all three so tightly bound. With knowledge comes new hope. The more we know, the more that changes in lifestyle and pre-emptive treatments can reduce risk of cardiovascular disease, still the number one killer in the United States.
When Hearts are Young: Cardiovascular Health Starts In the Womb
The connection between emotional well-being and the heart begins in the womb, when the unborn child's heartbeat pulses in time with that of her mother. Heart-to-heart synchrony continues after birth, when babies' hearts beat rhythmically with mothers and fathers during face-to-face interaction. "This is amazing—that one person can change the other person's physiology without even touching them, just by sensing the rhythm of their heartbeat and breath," says psychologist Ruth Feldman, of Bar-Ilan University in Israel, whose studies have shown that these early interactions lead to easy intimacy later in life. "Synchronized heartbeats are so basic to parent-child communication that they permeate every close human relationship from then on. Having a good synchronous relationship in the first year of life prepares infants to show more empathy and be able to read emotions better," Feldman says.
The converse is also true. When parent-child breathing or heartbeat detach from each other and go out of sync due to things like premature birth or postpartum depression, the impact can be so profound, it may be harder for that person to forge healthy relationships later in life, Feldman adds. It isn't that being out of sync predisposes a baby directly to heart trouble, of course. Rather, the shared rhythm shows just how sensitive the heart is to interpersonal experience and emotional expressions like rejection, anger, acceptance, and love.
As a child grows, the heart remains vulnerable to love, to stressors, and to pain. Even the turbulent events of 9/11 had an impact on young hearts. Psychologist Brooks Gump of the State University of New York at Oswego studied children in upstate New York after the destruction of the towers and found that even though the event was physically distant, it produced changes in children's cardiovascular responses compared to a similar group of children tested before the attacks. "If terrorism affects responses to stress, then chronic threats of terrorism might increase the risk for heart disease," Gump says.
Over time, stress exacts a price, wreaking damage that appears to be cumulative, Harvard psychologist Laura Kubzansky says. That's why stress-prone children are more likely to become stress-prone, at-risk adults.
A Two-Way Superhighway: The Biological Connection Between Heart and Mind
How can nebulous patterns of thinking and feeling "get inside the body" in a way that alters the outcome of disease? How are heart health and emotion linked?
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