Heart and lung, a dangerous liaison-Tako-tsubo cardiomyopathy and respiratory diseases: A systematic review

AIM: To investigate the possible association between Tako-tsubo cardiomyopathy(TTC)-a reversible clini-cal condition mimicking an acute myocardial infarction characterized by multifactorial pathophysiologic mecha-nisms- and respiratory system diseases. METHODS: We systematically searched PubMed and EMBASE medical information sources, to identify the different triggering causes, limiting our search to ar-ticles in English. The search keywords were: "tako-tsubo cardiomyopathy", "takotsubo", "takotsubo cardiomyopa-thy", "broken heart syndrome", "stress-induced cardio-myopathy", "apical ballooning syndrome", and "ampulla cardiomyopathy in combination with respiratory dis-eases, lung, pulmonary disease. For each kind of dis-ease, we registered: author, year and country of study, patient sex, age, concurring situation, and outcome. RESULTS: Out of a total of 1725 articles found, we se-lected 37 papers reporting a total of 38 patients. As ex-pected, most patients were women(81.6%), mean age was 65 ± 10 years. Outcome was favorable in 100% of cases, and all the patients have been discharged un-eventfully in a few days. CONCLUSION: An association between respiratory diseases and TTC is likely to exist. Patients with severe respiratory diseases, due to the high dosages of β2-agonists used or to the need of invasive procedures, are highly exposed to the risk of developing TTC.