Takotsubo cardiomyopathy triggered by wasabi consumption
casereports.bmj.com
casereports.bmj.com
It should probably be cleared up that she suffered left ventricular dysfunction from eating too much wasabi - I had originally read the title thinking she was emotionally distressed from not getting her avocado, but instead it's more like a nervous system shock from the wasabi/wasabi poisoning(?) itself?
Close relatives of the horseradish include woad (the ancient indigo source), turnips, rapeseed, cabbages, weeds (thale cress) and flowery shrubs & al. "Close relative" is not an indication of "not a lot of difference". You might as well say that mustard (also a close relative) is no different from wasabi.
You may well be right that there is no big difference between wasabi and horseradish, but them being "close relative" is not an actual argument for that unless they're much closer relative than just being in the same taxonomic family.
I didn't pick anything, I just looked up what the qualifier you picked meant. They're not the same species, they're not the same genus, they're the same taxonomic family, which also includes all the stuff I listed in my original comment.
>There's not a lot of difference between real and fake wasabi. One is horseradish and the other is a close relative of horseradish.
There was no strawman. Being a close relative does not imply "not a lot of difference."
> Takotsubo cardiomyopathy is a left ventricular dysfunction
> that typically occurs after sudden intense emotional
> or physical stress and mimics myocardial infarction.Though I don't get how you'd eat "a large amount of wasabi", surely the first spoonful would tell you it's not avocado unless you don't have nerve endings, or a nose?
> In our case report, the amount of wasabi our patient consumed was unusually large, about a size of a teaspoon ...
That's a lot of wasabi.
I use about a tablespoon (3 x as much) when I eat sushi (~6 pieces) but I like it spicy.
To this day, I can't do wasabi. My body decided it was poison at that moment and I'm very sensitive to the flavor.
Chilli and wasabi doesn't make you cry in the emotional sense. They stimulate the sinus and lacrimal glands to dilute and flush the irritant. There are other non-emotional triggers such as cutting onions. In that case we 'cry' to dilute and flush the sulphuric acid formed on the eye.
In fact, we apparently have (at least) four different types of tear! 'Basal' tears that keep our eyes wet have much higher lipid levels than any other type, and a higher fraction of their lipids are nonpolar. 'Reflex' and 'flush' tears are similar, they're both responses to irritants, but there seem to be differences between tears produced to remove solid/physical and liquid irritants. And then 'emotional' tears (which include pain) come with a host of hormones and other proteins basically absent from the general tear responses.
But even in Japan you don't really get it served in quantity. That stuff is expensive.
If you drink a shot of liquid LSD thinking it was vodka you don't die because "you didn't get some vodka?". She died because of the effect of wasabi, not because of the lack of avocado.
Luckily, he said, he really likes hot things, so while it was quite a surprise, it wasn't as nasty a shock as it could have been.
But yeah, I don't see how you could be confused after the first bite.
Edit: Somewhere else quotes the article as saying that the amount she'd eaten was "about a size of a teaspoon". That sounds similar.
Either we are dealing with a psychiatric patient with some strange food addiction or an idiot using wasabi to who knows, burn calories, clean the nose or rotten tooth/whatever.
The wasabi-avocado mistake sounds bogus to me.
At best this suggests further research is in order, but I’m not convinced anything can be definitively concluded here about the cardiotoxicity of wasabi.
Case report or not, what passes for medical research makes me shake my head.
Not bad to put out a case report, since if there is truth here, this could spur future knowledge. But it seems unlikely that wasabi was causal compared to, say, the wedding itself.
Come to think of it, triggers are not necessarily the underlying causes, so this particular diction in the abstract and title may be fully apt.
If we lived in a world where we could go back and see the true causes, I would bet that the true cause was not the wasabi. If historical evidence says that P(takotsubo|wedding) is low but nonzero and P(takotsubo|wasabi) is virtually zero, then my money is still on the wedding being the cause, even if nobody else at the wedding got takotsubo. (It's not thought to be transmissible as if it were an infectious disease.) Happy to be wrong here.
But, like any case report, this case report is interesting (which is why it was published). And if more evidence accumulates that wasabi can lead to stress cardiomyopathy, that would, indeed, be interesting.
The name "takotsubo syndrome" comes from the Japanese word takotsubo "octopus trap", because the left ventricle of the heart takes on a shape resembling an octopus trap when affected by this condition.
I texted her the link to this hinting that I might have saved her life that day. Evidently, she still avoids Japanese food, thanks to that incident.
So it was quite a shock to hear my mom was in the hospital for a heart issue a couple years back.
She was ultimately diagnosed with Takotsubo.
They had been watching a play at an outdoor theater, and during a very stressful/dramatic/revealing moment in the play (I think with loud drums, etc), she had these chest pains and was rushed to the hospital.
Very interesting to learn about this condition I hadn't heard of. The "good news" is that, if you recover, and go a few weeks (I want to say 6+) without a recurrence, the heart re-strengthens and you're not any more likely to have heart issues again than anyone else.