DR. SAM ARMITAGE: What is hypertension and why is it bad for you? Hypertension is elevated blood pressure. When your blood pressure is high, it is pushing too hard against arteries in your body and it causes to your heart to have to work too hard and this leads to cardiovascular disease, heart disease, or strokes. It can also lead to kidney disease as well as eye problems. Hypertension is one of the most common ailments in the U.S. One in four Americans suffer from hypertension and approximately a third of these people do not know that they have hypertension. It is virtually symptomless, unless you are one of the few people who have headaches, fatigue, dizziness, or other such things from extraordinarily high blood pressure. Most people first learn of their hypertension from their physician. It's important to treat hypertension because by lowering your hypertension, you will lower your chances of having heart attacks or strokes. Heart attack is the leading cause of death in America today and indeed, the world; and stroke is number three. Together in combined cardiovascular deaths are 2.4 times more likely to happen to anyone today than all forms of cancer. There are no real symptoms to hypertension and most people won't have any reliable indicators that they are having hypertension. You can learn if your pressure is elevated by checking with your physician's office. Most offices will check for free or by checking at a local pharmacy or anywhere there's the automatic cuffs that you can do. You can also purchase cuffs for home blood pressure monitoring for approximately $50 to $80. hypertension today is currently defined as a blood pressure systolic or the top number of greater than 140 over the bottom number of 90. However most physicians today agree that your blood pressure really should be targeted below 120 on the top number and about 70 on the bottom number. Anything in between those ranges 120 to about 140 on the top and 70 to 90 is generally considered something like prehypertension and it means that you need to start taking steps in order to avoid developing full-blown hypertension. The simplest treatments for hypertension are going to be weight loss and regular exercise. Dietary changes can also help avoiding fats in your diet, avoiding high sodium loads in your diet. Sodium causes retention of water which, of course, can increase the pressure inside the body. These are the simple things that a lot of people do use in order to lower their blood pressure. However, most people at some point will wind up needing some medication in order to control their blood pressure. We have multiple classes of medicines that will lower blood pressure. Many do it very effectively and with very few side effects. Please talk to your doctor about what would be the best choice for you. Developing healthy habits at an early age is always helpful. In order to avoid developing hypertension or to delay its onset as much as possible, staying at a healthy weight is very important, getting regular exercise and eating a healthy diet. All of the things that we know we should do, quitting smoking now, avoid excessive caffeine and alcohol intake, avoiding excessive salt intake. All of those things will delay or even prevent the progression hypertension. If you suspect that you have hypertension or your physician has told you that you have hypertension, many people would like to try dietary and what we called, lifestyle modifications first before they jump into taking medications. Usually, these are fairly effective at getting pressure down if it's only mildly elevated. If your pressure is significantly high, you'll want to see your doctor immediately and they will probably start your medication pretty quickly. But by doing the things that we know that we should do anyway whether it's losing weight, exercising regularly, eating more healthy diet, avoiding saturated fats, avoiding heavy sodium loads; all of these things will help to lower blood pressure and may in fact, make you nonhypertensive.
