Although "heartbreak" ordinarily does not imply any physical defect in the heart, there is a condition known as "Takotsubo cardiomyopathy" (broken heart syndrome), where a traumatising incident triggers the brain to distribute chemicals that weaken heart tissue.
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Broken heart syndrome is commonly blamed for the death of a person whose spouse is already deceased, but the cause is not always so clear-cut.
In a March 2008 study, Jaap Spreeuw and Xu Wang of the Cass Business School observed that in the year following a loved one’s death, women were more than twice as likely to die than normal, and men more than six times as likely.
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The broken heart syndrome also led financial analyst David X. Li to develop the Gaussian copula models for the pricing of collateralized debt obligations where at times seemingly unrelated entities become subject to sympathetic financial defaults based on common (but at times not obvious) links.