['Our objective was to investigate whether dobutamine stress echocardiography (DSE) could induce abnormal cardiac function in takotsubo stress cardiomyopathy (TSC) patients in a stable condition after the acute attack.', 'This was a case-control study and a substudy of the Stockholm Myocardial Infarction With Normal Coronaries (SMINC) study. Twenty-two patients with a previous episode of TSC and 22 sex- and age-matched control subjects were recruited from the SMINC study and investigated with the use of DSE. All TSC patients had a previous normal cardiovascular magnetic resonance investigation. Tissue Doppler imaging-derived time phases of the cardiac cycle were recorded to calculate myocardial performance index (MPI) to assess ventricular function. Compared with control subjects at rest, TSC patients had a slightly but significantly higher left ventricular MPI (LV-MPI; 0.53 vs 0.59; P\xa0=\xa0.01) and as a trend higher right ventricular MPI (0.38 vs 0.47; P\xa0=\xa0.08), although during DSE these variables did not differ significantly.'] Does vulnerability to sympathetic stress persist in takotsubo stress cardiomyopathy?