Facts About Hypertension

• Other familiar names are high blood pressure and the silent killer.
• While it may be easy to comprehend the term “high blood pressure” but why “silent killer”? Well, because there are particularly no warning symptoms before hypertension strikes a person (as if suddenly) in the form of a stroke, heart attack, heart failure, eye hemorrhage (damage of the retina) and kidney disease (kidneys do play a part in controlling blood pressure).
• There are two types of hypertension : primary and secondary hypertension. Primary hypertension is not caused by a specific health condition but there are risk factors associated with it, such as obesity, smoking, stress and high sodium intake. Secondary hypertension is caused by an underlying health problem, most commonly from arteriosclerosis (the accumulation of fatty plaque along the walls of blood vessels that obstructs blood circulation).
• The heart is a fist-sized hollow muscular organ and functions automatically on it’s own without the brain’s instruction. It collects oxygen-depleted blood from the body before pumping it to the lungs and then supplying oxygen-rich blood from the lungs to all parts of the body. Blood pressure is the force blood exerts on the walls of the arteries as the heart pumps it through the arteries. An increase in the blood volume pumped from the heart would increase blood pressure and cause blood vessels to dilate.
• Blood pressure is measured as the systole and diastole pressures. Systole blood pressure (SBP) accounts for the pressure when the heart contracts (resulting in a heart beat), pumps blood into the aorta (the body’s main artery) which branches off to other smaller arteries. Diastole blood pressure (DBP) accounts for the pressure when the heart relaxes, the valves open allowing blood to cruise into the ventricles. Represented as 130/80mm Hg where the SBP is 130 mm Hg and 80 mm Hg is the DBP.
• The body’s blood pressure rises and falls naturally throughout the day. Stressful situations or moments of excitment make the heart beat faster so as to keep up with the increased demand for more blood and oxygen. Thus blood pressure would go up. When the body is at rest, especially during sleeptime, blood pressure lowers down. The health danger alert sounds when the blood pressure persists at very high levels for long periods of time.
• A normal reading should be 120/80mm Hg or below. When blood pressure is up, the reading would be above 140/90mm Hg. A prehypertensive reading is between 120/80mg to 139/89mm Hg.
• An elevated blood pressure can weaken a small artery in the brain till it eventually bursts. When this happens, the brain tissue is damaged due to a lack of blood flow. This is known as a stroke.
• Hypertension can hasten the deposit of cholesterol plaque in the arteries. These deposits may take a long time to build, making early detection difficult. Such a build up can occur in the heart, causing angina (severe pain) and heart attacks; the brain, causing strokes; the kidneys, leading to kidney failure; and the legs, resulting in pain while walking or what is known as intermittent claudication.

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