A 63-year-old woman with no history of heart disease hung up after a phone call with her health insurance company, feeling what her doctors later described as "strong feelings of frustration and anger." Right away, she sensed that something was wrong. Within hours, physicians were treating her for a possible heart attack.
The final diagnosis was stress cardiomyopathy, better known as takotsubo or broken heart syndrome. Cardiologists at the University of Vermont Larner College of Medicine described the case in a report in Case Reports in Cardiology, published online on February 19, 2026, under a title that captures the irony: "When the Healthcare System Breaks a Heart."
