What Is Considered
High Blood Pressure?

Arteries pump blood out of your heart into the rest of your body. Blood pressure rises and falls throughout the day, naturally.

However, there are instances when the amount of pressure in the arteries rises too high. This is called high blood pressure.

Medically known as hypertension, high blood pressure is dangerous. It causes your heart to pump harder and sometimes faster. Because of this, it leads to atherosclerosis, which is the hardening of the arteries.

When that occurs, you are at an increased risk of having heart disease, stroke or even suffering a fatal heart attack. Heart disease is the leading cause of death among Americans and strokes are the third most common.

Plus, there is other damage that high blood pressure may cause:

• It can lead to congestive heart failure, in which the muscle of your heart is too weak to pump blood throughout your body
• It can cause kidney failure
• It can possibly lead to blindness

When doctors take blood pressure readings, they want to know two things. They need to know what the pressure is when the heart is full of blood and when the heart is contracting and squeezing the blood out into the arteries.

This is displayed in a figure such as 120/80, which is considered to be a normal blood pressure range. Those whose have blood pressure readings of 129/89 are considered to have pre hypertension. Those over this number have hypertension or high blood pressure.

Important Numbers

One interesting fact about high blood pressure is that it can be controlled through a healthy lifestyle and weight management, in most people. Further, if you reach age 55 without having high blood pressure, you still have a 90 percent chance of developing it at some point. In other words, most people have high blood pressure at some time in their lives.

Talking to Your Doctor

One of the things you should do is to talk to your doctor about your condition. When you understand what is considered high blood pressure readings, you can better learn what may be causing this condition to affect you. The good news is that there are treatment options that can help and can control these numbers effectively.



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The Ravages of High Blood Pressure

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