[carbocation]

As a cardiologist, this is also my perception (that you can’t assign causality to wasabi here).

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.

[calf]

Doctors are not trained scientists but I imagine the authors took the inductive position that many people at the wedding did not get the heart attack and the woman who ate the wasabi was triggered by it.

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.

[carbocation]

Yeah, I have no complaints about any part of this publication. This is typical of case reports.

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.

[mywittyname]

Aside: now does a cardiologist become a member of Hacker News?

[carbocation]

Your question prompted me to realize that I’ve been on HN for over a decade...

[teej]

There are a bunch of physicians of different specialties in this community. It’s not uncommon.

[bookofjoe]

Hear, hear: neurosurgical anesthesiologist (retired) here

[Cerium]

Yeah, how can we get more experts from various fields.

[imtringued]

It's right in the domain name: ycombinator