Disclaimer. This article is written for educational purposes only. It should not be used as a substitute for seeking professional help. This topic is only mentioned to spark ideas and is not covered in depth. Furthermore, EDL encourages you to research more about high blood pressure. A longer and healthy life should follow if your apply your research.
How does this blood pressure thing work anyway?
Before we jump into defining blood pressure, it will do us good to further analyze other contributing factors. we will begin our discussion by covering arteries and blood vessels.
Arteries carry oxygen enriched blood from the heart to other parts of the body. They are elastic. Moreover blood pushes against your blood vessels and arteries to create blood pressure. In order for proper circulation to occur within the body, this blood pressure is needed. The body must have blood for each system to function. That is why proper blood pressure is so important to maintain
If our blood pushes up against these walls to hard, our hearts will have to work harder to push blood to these areas of the body. Hence why high blood pressure is not good. Three things will occur with high blood pressure. First the heart works harder and overtime this can have a negative effect. Second our blood fails to move as smoothly through blood vessels. Third the blood vessels stretch out when blood pushes against the walls and with high blood pressure these vessels to keep stretching. Soon the negative effects of high blood pressure will be seen overtime. It's good to remind yourself from time to time that blood vessels can only stretch so much before they rupture. Proper care must be taken. Symptoms of high blood pressure rarely reveal themselves. So you could have high blood pressure for years before you know it.
Some risk factors of high blood pressure are:
family history, age, gender, lack of physical exercise, salt intake, unhealthy diet, being overweight, drinking, smoking, or stress.*
Normal blood pressure is 120/80 high blood pressure is 140/90-180/110.* High blood pressure never goes away but it can be lowered and maintained. A list of some suggested techniques are moderate exercise, lower salt diet, reduce stress, and medication (specifically diuretics that help the body eliminate salt and water). Other medications can help to like ACE inhibitors which expand blood vessels to make blood flow easier or blood vessel dilators which relax blood vessel walls so they can expand to readily let the blood flow better. There are other medications and recommendations. Again this is not an all inclusive list and these are just ideas.
Please take action for good heart health. The heart is critically important to our health.
*American Heart Association. (2014). Understanding and Managing High Blood Pressure. American Heart Association, American Stroke Association. 1, 1-13.
*Nature publishing group (2005). Battling hypertension. Nature Structural & Molecular Biology. 12, 471
