Can You Lower Blood Pressure From Hypertension to Normal Again?

Personal Health

Even levels of blood pressure that are by and large considered "normal" may be high enough to foster the evolution of centre disease, new enquiry shows.

Credit... Gracia Lam

So you remember your blood pressure is normal? Think again.

The latest iteration of an "ideal" blood force per unit area — a level of 120 millimeters of mercury for systolic pressure level, the top number — that Americans are urged to attain and maintain has been called into question by a long-term multiethnic study of otherwise healthy adults.

The study, published in June in JAMA Cardiology, found that as systolic blood pressure rose higher up xc mm, the run a risk of damage to coronary arteries rose forth with information technology. Systolic claret pressure represents the pressure inside arteries when the heart pumps (every bit opposed to diastolic claret pressure, the lower smaller number, when the heart rests).

The new findings suggest a demand to look more advisedly at why, despite considerable overall improvements in adventure factors for heart illness in recent decades, it remains the nation'south leading killer.

Starting in the 1940s, cardiovascular researchers have unveiled evidence that Americans live in a society that all but guarantees a disproportionately loftier risk of developing and dying of center disease. Since my first weeks writing for this newspaper in the early 1960s, I've publicized their advice urging people to curb preventable risks to their hearts and claret vessels.

Although meaning progress has been fabricated along several fronts, especially drastic cuts in cigarette smoking and lowered levels of artery-damaging cholesterol, atherosclerotic heart disease still kills far also many people in this state long earlier they reach their potential life span. If not for a plethora of therapeutic advances, like antihypertensive drugs, cholesterol-lowering statins and open-centre surgery to bypass clogged arteries, life expectancy would be a lot worse for many people.

Merely the overall picture suggests we've still got a long way to go. For example, as Americans get fatter and fatter, 2 major take chances factors for heart illness — Type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure level — ascension forth with readings on bathroom scales.

Yeah, there are medications to treat both weather condition. Simply why resort to pills, including drugs with unwanted side effects, to modify risks that are within the personal control of most people?

And as shown in the study, even levels of blood pressure that are mostly considered "normal" may indeed be high enough to foster the development of atherosclerotic centre disease past more than than fourfold to a higher place the risk faced past people with systolic blood pressures that are physiologically platonic.

Heart experts have long known that people in traditional nonindustrial societies typically maintain systolic blood pressures in the depression 90s throughout life. Unlike typical Americans, their blood pressure does non rise with age. Rather, it seems, the increase in blood pressure most common among Americans equally they age into mid- and late adulthood is an antiquity of our sedentary lifestyles and diets too rich in calories and high in sodium, all of which result in stiff, narrowed arteries that consequence in high blood force per unit area.

The study, directed by Dr. Seamus P. Whelton, cardiologist and epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Ciccarone Center for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease in Baltimore, followed a cohort of 1,457 eye-aged men and women initially complimentary of atherosclerotic vascular disease and known take chances factors for 14.5 years. As the participants anile, their adventure factors for heart illness increased, forth with calcium deposits in their coronary arteries and cardiovascular events like heart attacks and strokes.

The research team focused on increases in systolic blood pressure with age, adjusting the data for changes in other heart risks. They constitute that for every 10 mm increase in systolic blood pressure, the take a chance of calcium deposits and cardiovascular events rose accordingly. Compared with people with systolic pressures of ninety to 99 mm, those with pressures of 120 to 129 mm were 4.58 times more likely to have experienced a cardiovascular consequence.

Still, Dr. Whelton said in an interview that information technology would be wrong to focus preventive strategies on claret pressure lone. People with high blood pressure, he said, "are also more likely to have college cholesterol and blood glucose levels. The platonic strategy would focus on all run a risk factors — blood cholesterol, blood saccharide and blood pressure. Maintaining a healthful nutrition, exercising, not smoking and consuming alcohol only in moderation would improve all the risk factors for cardiovascular disease."

Levels of what doctors consider a healthy systolic blood force per unit area have been falling for virtually half a century. In August 1950, a report in JAMA suggested that labeling systolic blood pressures of 140, 150 or 160 mm every bit abnormally loftier is "capricious, particularly when age is concerned." The authors suggested that raising adequate blood pressure levels for people over xl "would result in a decrease in the reported incidence of hypertension and thus abate some of the widespread and unnecessary fear regarding high blood pressure."

The latest claret pressure advisory, issued in 2017 by the American Heart Association and American Higher of Cardiology, considers a systolic blood pressure of 120 mm the upper limit of normal, and defines 130 mm and above as high blood force per unit area that warrants treatment with lifestyle measures or medication.

In an editorial accompanying the new written report, Dr. Daniel Westward. Jones, hypertension specialist at the Academy of Mississippi Medical Eye who helped codify the electric current blood pressure level guidelines, wrote, "the run a risk imposed by a blood pressure level beneath the currently defined hypertensive level is continuous beginning with a systolic blood force per unit area as depression every bit 90 mm mercury."

Dr. Jones said in an interview, "Normal claret pressure can be in the 90s, which is what it is in young healthy women, before the vascular organization is damaged by elevated blood pressure over the years. Prevention should get-go with children, with a healthy diet depression in table salt and regular exercise, and adults should avoid gaining weight with historic period, which I realize is very difficult to do in our toxic nutrient society."

In praising me for maintaining a systolic blood pressure level of 100 to 110 throughout my adult life, he said, "It'south rare for Americans to accomplish your age of 79 and non accept hypertension."

When I asked why doctors don't put more than emphasis on maintaining youthful levels of blood pressure, Dr. Jones said that in the 1960s medical schools taught that claret pressure should rise with age to assure an adequate claret supply to the brain.

"Only in recent decades has it been accepted that it's actually improve for the encephalon, kidneys and middle to go on claret force per unit area downwardly as people age," he said.

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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/19/well/live/blood-pressure-heart-disease.html

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