Family: JoePa did not die of broken heart
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"I don't fish. I don't golf. I don't cut the lawn. I don't want to die. Football is my life."
Don't say we weren't warned: Joe Paterno repeatedly said he would die if he couldn't coach football.
As mourners gather in University Park today for a memorial service for the legendary Penn State football coach, who succumbed to lung cancer Sunday, two months after being fired, many wonder if he really died of a broken heart.
Mr. Paterno, who was fired Nov. 9 in the wake of a child sex abuse scandal involving his former assistant Jerry Sandusky, was diagnosed with lung cancer just days afterward -- a particularly lethal, aggressive form of it.
On Twitter, Facebook and all over the Internet this week was speculation that Mr. Paterno had lost the will to live, citing University of Alabama's football coach Paul "Bear" Bryant, who died of a heart attack 28 days after he retired ("Quit coaching, and I'd croak within a week," Bryant said.)
But Mr. Paterno's son Jay specifically rejected that idea, stressing Sunday that his father "didn't have a broken heart," and fought his illness to the end, adding that when he celebrated his 85th birthday on Dec. 21, surrounded by his children and grandchildren, "he was in a really good place."
While many experts on aging believe a traumatic event -- loss of a spouse or of an all-consuming job -- hastens death, the scientific evidence is less conclusive.
Several large studies have shown that people who retire at a young age die sooner than those who continue to work, which may be because they were ill to begin with. Still other studies link early death with a single traumatic event, mostly loss of a spouse -- although women are more affected than men.
"We don't know if this major crisis in Mr. Paterno's life precipitated a more rapid decline, but it certainly didn't help," said Sean Morrison, professor of geriatrics and palliative medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. "Advanced lung cancer has a pretty awful prognosis, and psychological factors can have a significant impact on the quality of life and survival."
Moreover, men don't possess the same coping mechanisms as women do, said George Dickinson, professor of sociology at the College of Charleston and author of "Understanding Dying, Death, and Bereavement."
"For men of Mr. Paterno's generation, work was everything, and after retirement they don't really know what to do with themselves," he said, noting that women are able to form support groups or express emotions in times of great loss. "Men like Mr. Paterno were trained to be stoic."
While it's not known if Mr. Paterno suffered from depression, a 2009 analysis at the University of British Columbia looked at more than two dozen studies with a total of 9,417 patients, and concluded that depression can affect a cancer patient's likelihood of survival. Death rates in the combined studies were as much as 25 percent higher for those cancer patients with "depressive symptoms," and 39 percent higher in patients with major or minor depression.
Jennifer Steel, associate professor of surgery and psychiatry at the at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, cited a study she co-authored in the Journal of Clinical Oncology that found that depressive symptoms contributed to increased risk of mortality in those diagnosed with liver cancer.
Nonetheless, for every study that has found that treatment of depression improves survival rates in cancer patients, "an equal number have not confirmed those findings," she said.
Did he die of a broken heart? Mr. Paterno, in a recent interview, seemed not to know -- or if he did, he wasn't saying.
"Hey, the good Lord got a reason," he told the Washington Post.
First Published January 26, 2012 12:00 am
