Key result
Strong emotion and mental stress, particularly anger, play a significant role in severe and fatal ventricular arrhythmias through an integrated interactive brain-heart system.
Understanding the brain-heart connection and the specific autonomic signatures of emotions like anger provides mechanistic insights into stress-induced ventricular arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death.
May support considering stress reduction in arrhythmia patients; extends brain-heart models but leaves open prospective interventional trials.
Strong emotion and mental stress are now recognized as playing a significant role in severe and fatal ventricular arrhythmias. The mechanisms, although incompletely understood, include central processing at the cortical and brain stem level, the autonomic nerves and the electrophysiology of the myocardium. Each of these is usually studied separately by investigators from different disciplines. However, many are regulatory processes which incorporate interactive feedforward and feedback mechanisms. In this review we consider the whole as an integrated interactive brain-heart system.
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Taggart et al. (2011) conducted a review in Ventricular arrhythmias. Strong emotion and mental stress, particularly anger, play a significant role in severe and fatal ventricular arrhythmias through an integrated interactive brain-heart system.
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