Do You Have High Blood Pressure? How many times have your doctor told you that your blood pressure is good. But you may need to check it again.
Because in the past, most doctors told you if you had high blood pressure, if your diastolic blood pressure was high. The diastolic is the bottom number in the blood pressure reading.
Researchers are now saying that the systolic blood pressure, the top number is more important. Even if the diastolic blood pressure is normal.
This means that a lot more people may have high blood pressure than was previously thought. So, as you get older, your arteries stiffen, causing your systolic pressure to go up. The artery stiffening doesn’t affect the diastolic pressure. Because it has a tendency to go down.
In a study of 2,365 people with a systolic pressure of 160 to 240 mm and a diastolic pressure of 90 mm or less. They were treated with blood pressure lowing drugs and gave a placebo to a control group.
The group receiving the drugs had a 36 percent fewer strokes and 35 percent fewer death due to coronary heart disease. These are the same people who would have had normal blood pressure according to the old way of figuring.
In order to get accurate systolic blood pressure levels, you may want to check it more than once. Because systolic blood pressure levels can be high at one time and low at another, if you are over 60.
Medical Sources:
Archives of Internal Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association
Tags: arteries stiffen, better health, blood pressure reading, coronary heart disease, diastolic blood pressure, do you have high blood pressure, systolic blood pressure