Stress-Induced Cardiomyopathy

Abstract

The irreversible termination of individual life activities and metabolism means all fatal problems ultimately terminate the heart function. It’s very important to protect the patient’s life if we have treatment to maintain heart function and care about patients’ heart response. It is known that many diseases induced heart dysfunction including Chagas disease, burn injury, smoking and other bad stresses. Chronic stress causes these physical symptoms and emotional symptoms. Due to the awareness created by the media and internet, patients are generally aware that they should seek help immediately for chest pain. Therefore, attention and studies on stress-induced heart dysfunction would help uncover the pathophysiological mechanisms of cardiac response to non-heart diseases and provide an insight of heart-protection drugs. At the same time, physicians should be aware of this new condition and how to diagnose and treat it, even though the causal mechanisms are not yet fully understood. This special chapter will discuss on the cardiac response to the stresses especially on our associated research in recent decades such as Trypanosoma cruzi (T. cruzi)-induced cardiomyopathy and burn injury–induced cardiomyopathy, and on some very popular stresses such as behavior, motion, mental, and smoking.