High blood pressure is a number that refers to the level of pressure on the walls of the arteries. The first number or systolic measurement is the pressure when the blood is closest to the heart muscle. The second number is the reading at the end of the heart beat when the chamber of the heart is refilling and the pressure on the artery walls is lowest. The normal range for adults up to age forty is 120 over 80 mm Hg. When the range is too high, the person is said to have hypertension.
Hypertension is often called the silent killer. It has no early symptoms. In fact, many people have hypertension and don't realize it until readings are taken and the true levels of pressure are determined. Even when the disease is well progressed, the individual may not realize anything is wrong until there are complications. There is growing awareness of the dangers of hypertension. It is the second most common reason for visiting medical professionals in the United States. Hypertension affects more than sixty million people in the United States annually.
Some of the risk factors of hypertension have been identified. In almost nine cases out of ten, the specific cause of the condition is unknown. This is known as essential or primary hypertension. Hypertension that is uncontrolled may be a contributing factor in many deaths and disabilities. For example, hypertension is linked to heart attacks, kidney failure and strokes. Some of the risk factors to develop hypertension are controllable others are not.
Those factors that you are not able to affect that are linked to hypertension include age, race, socioeconomic status, heredity and gender. Factors that can be changed or managed include obesity, sodium sensitivity, inactivity, birth control pills, heredity, alcohol and certain medications. It is important to manage those factors that are within your control, even if the non-controllable factors are high.
Amongst the uncontrollable risk factors, age is an important component of health. The older a person is, the more likely they are to have developed some level of hypertension. Again, it is the high systolic reading that can be cause for concern. The primary cause for age related hypertension is often hardening of arteries also known as arteriosclerosis.
African Americans are more likely to suffer from hypertension than are Caucasians. The disease usually develops earlier in life and complications are likely to be more severe. Lower socioeconomic classes, particularly those who live in the southeastern portion of America have a higher rate of occurrence for hypertension that do those in other parts of the country. Men develop hypertension more often than do women and hypertension tends to run in families.
Amongst the factors for hypertension which can be monitored and controlled, obesity is probably the most common. Simply put, the higher the body weight, the higher the blood pressure is likely to be. Being overweight increases the risk of developing hypertension. Physicians recommend that overweight patients bring their weight to within fifteen percent of the ideal range to reduce the risk of developing overly high readings. Patients who are overweight may be up to six times as likely to develop hypertension that are those people who maintain weight within a normal range.
Complications of high blood pressure may be more significant in in their effect upon overall health than the disease itself. Hypertension that is not well controlled can cause heart attacks, strokes, and peripheral artery disease. Hypertension is also involved in congestive heart failure, kidney failure and aortic aneurysms. For an individual with hypertension, the risk of succumbing to a heart attack is closely linked to systolic hypertension. The higher the readings for blood pressure, the higher the level of risk associated with hypertension.