What becomes of the broken-hearted?

 New research completed in February confirms what the more romantic of us may already suspect — that you really can die of a broken heart. The good news, however, is that it seems you can recover from one too.

In work sponsored by the Actuarial Profession, Dr Jaap Spreeuw of Cass Business School has confirmed that people really do die from ‘broken heart syndrome’ but that this is most likely to happen in the first year of bereavement. After that time the risk diminishes.

For the research, entitled Modelling the short-term dependence between two remaining lifetimes of a couple, Dr Spreeuw and a fellow academic Mr Xu Wang examined nearly 12 000 life assurance contracts from North America over a five-year period. The pair found that in the year immediately after the death of a spouse, the risk of death for those left behind was greater than in subsequent years.

Further information is available on the Profession’s website www.actuaries.org.uk