Social networks may not be for the broken hearted.

An 18-year-old man, depressed after his girlfriend broke up with him, appears to have had asthma attacks brought on by logging into the social media site, five Italian doctors wrote in the journal Lancet.

She had deleted him from her page and “friended” other men. The former boyfriend used a new name to become friends with her again so he could see this.

The site seemed to induce shortness of breath each time he looked, wrote the doctors.

“The [man's] mother was advised to ask him to measure the peak expiratory flow before and after internet login and, indeed, ‘post-Facebook’ values were reduced, with a variability of more than 20 percent,” wrote Dr. Gennaro D'Amato of the High Speciality Hospital A Cardarelli in Naples, Italy.

“In collaboration with a psychiatrist, the patient resigned not to login to Facebook any longer and the asthma attacks stopped.”

Once the doctors took a full history and physical exam, they concluded it was seeing the girlfriend on Facebook that triggered the attacks. They concluded that social networks could be a new source of psychological stress and should be considered by doctors assessing others with asthma.

Has Facebook or another social network caused you stress?