HOW WE’RE BEATING HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE
Posted by adminYou could have high blood pressure at this moment and not know it. Usually, there are no symptoms of this sneaky disease that slowly and secretly undermines your organs.
Then, one day, a blood vessel bursts in your head, and a stroke paralyzes you. Or a blood clot forms in one of the coronary arteries, which feed blood to your heart. A clot prevents blood (and, therefore, oxygen) from getting to the heart muscle. Starved for oxygen, a chunk of the heart dies.
Or your body fills up with water – your heart and kidneys cannot get rid of fluid.
Still, there is hope for the 70 million Americans with elevated blood pressure that warrants some type of therapy or regular monitoring. In more than half the cases of high blood pressure, or hypertension, doctors can control the disease with drugs. And many don’t even need drugs; doctors simply prescribe losing weight, lowering the intake of salt and alcohol, exercising, and learning to relax.
The lowering of salt in food is somewhat controversial. Not all types of high blood pressure respond negatively when you eat too much salt. The pressure in these types of hypertension does not increase with salt intake. But only a doctor can tell you whether your high blood pressure is salt sensitive.
“Thanks to the progress made in treating high blood pressure over the last 30 years, largely with new drugs and greater patient awareness of a healthy diet and lifestyle, tens of thousands of lives have been saved,” says Dr. Ray Gif-ford. He works at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation and is one of the nation’s leading experts on high blood pressure. Since 1973, deaths from stroke have dropped by more than 50 percent, and deaths from heart attack have fallen 35 percent.
“Better hypertension control has contributed to the remarkable decline in deaths,” says Ed Roccella of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. “The precise contribution is still not clear, but evidence from clinical studies has clearly demonstrated the effects of lowering blood pressure on reducing stroke deaths. The effects of reduced blood pressure on heart attack are less clear but still apparent.”
Three of four individuals with high blood pressure are being treated today – that’s twice the number of patients who were under treatment in 1972, adds Dr. Roccella.
Normally, as your heart contracts, it pushes blood out into that giant web of arteries and veins. Arteries carry blood away from the heart; veins carry blood back to the heart and lungs to refresh the blood with oxygen.
With the heart pumping, the blood, which, of course, is liquid, pushes against the walls of the blood vessels. That’s the pressure that doctors talk about. The pressure rises to a peak when the lower half of the heart muscle squirts blood into the arterial tree. That’s called systolic pressure.
When the heart relaxes, the pressure drops but the blood continues to flow. That’s called diastolic pressure.
In the United States, 28 million hypertensive adults have systolic pressures greater than 160 or diastolic pressures greater than 95. An additional 20 million Americans have less severe but still serious readings: systolic pressures between 140 and 160, and diastolic pressures between 90 and 95.
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