3 Diseases Caused By High Blood Pressure

July 31st, 2008

Coronary Heart Disease: The same plaque that blocks arteries to the brain can clog arteries that feed the heart.  Remember that all cells need oxygen from the bloodstream to survive.  So reducing the amount of blood to the heart muscle can drastically weaken it.  If a blood clot gets stuck in one of these heart arteries (called coronary arteries), heart muscle cells can die.  This is a heart attack.  When too many heart muscle cells die, or when the heart muscle has been strained for a long time, the heart can’t pump blood through the body very well.  This is called heart failure.  Obviously, both a heart attack and heart failure are extremely serious and sometimes fatal.

Kidney Damage: Your kidneys are responsible for removing excess fluid and waste from your body.  They work by filtering the blood that passes through them.  But high blood pressure can damage the arteries within the kidneys.  It can also narrow the arteries that feed blood to the kidneys.  Either way, the kidneys become less efficient at removing fluid and waste.  The worst-case scenario is called renal failure - a complete shutdown of kidney function.  When this happens, you need dialysis or a kidney transplant.

High blood pressure can be double trouble where your kidneys are concerned.  If you have hypertension, you might suffer kidney damage and reduced kidney function.  This, in turn, can lead to even higher blood pressure, since your kidneys won’t be able to remove excess fluid from the bloodstream.  This is why controlling high blood pressure is so important.  It breaks the vicious circle of damage.

Aneurysm: Constant high blood pressure puts quite a strain on your arteries.  It can cause them to develop bulges that balloon out and weaken over time.  Sometimes these bulges, called aneurysms, burst, causing drastic problems.

When the burst blood vessel is in the brain, the result is a hemorrhagic stroke.  Another type of aneurysm involves the aorta, the huge artery that carries blood from the heart down the chest and into your midsection.  Over time, extra pressure can weaken this vital artery and cause it to burst.  In especially bad cases, the weak spot can actually split the walls of the aorta - a condition known as a dissecting aortic aneurysm.  This type of aneurysm causes tremendous pain in your chest, abdomen, or back.  Lowering blood pressure can reduce your chances of developing an aneurysm.  If you already have one, you may need surgery to repair it.  If the aneurysm is small, your doctor may just monitor it to make sure it doesn’t increase in size and require an operation to fix.

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What Is High Blood Pressure?

July 5th, 2008

High blood pressure, or hypertension, is not the same thing as heart disease, but it can make heart disease worse.  By damaging its arteries and making the heart work too hard, hypertension can help trigger (or be a risk factor for) heart attacks.

Both heart disease and hypertension can kill you.  Heart disease can cause you to spend the rest of your life with chest pain or shortness of breath.  But not only does hypertension make heart disease more likely, it can cause you to “stroke out” so that - even if you survive - you spend the rest of your life partially paralyzed, unable to hear, or unable to speak.

There are some similarities in the causes of hypertension and coronary artery heart disease.  For a long time, we have understood that coronary artery heart disease is due to mistakes in lifestyle, especially nutrition (particularly an overindulgence of dietary fat).  But there are also critical differences in their causes.  An important cause of coronary artery heart disease is dietary fat and cholesterol.  The most important contributor to hypertension, however, is a low ratio of potassium (K) to sodium (Na) - the K Factor - in the food people eat.

Also, high blood pressure is not the same thing as, nor is it due to, “hardening of the arteries” - a term that refers to the cumulative effects of age and poor nutrition, in addition to hypertension, upon the arteries.  And lastly, hypertension is not a type of nervous tension.

Whether or not your doctor decides you have hypertension depends on how high your blood pressure is.  That’s all there is to it.  Blood pressure is the pressure the blood exerts against the walls of all your arteries (the large blood vessels that carry blood from your heart to your body’s tissues).  Your heart creates this blood pressure by pumping blood into the arteries.  How can you tell if your blood pressure is too high?  You can’t - unless it’s measured.  In fact, about a third of the people with high blood pressure don’t realize they have it.

How It Is Measured

Your doctor measures your blood pressure by inflating a cuff around your arm with enough pressure to squeeze the artery inside your arm shut.  By releasing the pressure of the cuff and listening to the sounds of the pulsating blood as the artery reopens, your doctor can determine your blood pressure.

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