It's not just love that can break your heart

Broken heart syndrome is one heart throb you want to avoid. Here's how to recognize and elude this unusual disorder.

It's rare, but a sudden emotional blow such as the death of a loved one can shock the heart into forming an unusual oval shape, rendering it incapable of doing its job.

"When a person first comes in, the heart can look terribly weak. It may be barely squeezing. In a severe case, you'd be in the intensive care unit in shock, and without medical attention you wouldn't survive," said Dr. Ilan Wittstein, an assistant professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins Medicine, who published one of the first papers on broken heart syndrome, also called stress cardiomyopathy.