HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE
If you’re the kind of guy who has all kinds of extra memory on your computer or even a turbocharger on your riding lawn mower, you may be wondering, what’s the fuss about high blood pressure? Doesn’t higher pressure mean more power? And how in a man’s world could that ever be bad?
For one thing, high blood pressure makes you a prime candidate for a stroke, the third leading killer of men. In fact, the National Stroke Association says that between 40 and 90 percent of all stroke victims had high blood pressure before their strokes. “No question about it, high blood pressure leads the hit list,” says Ralph Sacco, M.D., director of the Northern Manhattan Stroke Study at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City and spokesperson for the National Stroke Association. What’s more, high blood pressure is the leading risk factor for congestive heart failure and has been linked to, among other things, heart disease, kidney disease, and an ominous-sounding problem called brain shrinkage.
If all this sounds fairly negative, you’re starting to get the picture. High blood pressure itself may not put you in a pine box – although about 40,000 Americans die from it each year – but it can sure help you along. “We’re talking about a problem that affects 50 million people,” says Eva Obarzanek, R.D., Ph.D., a research nutritionist at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood
Institute in Washington, D.C. “If we could lower people’s blood pressure, we could cut the number of serious diseases dramatically.”
A peek inside your cardiovascular system shows why.
Think of your heart as one incredibly well-built pump and your arteries, veins, and capillaries as a vast plumbing system of flexible, interconnected tubes carrying blood throughout your body. And when we say vast, we mean it: Stretched length-wise, the vessels of your circulatory system would measure an amazing 60,000 miles. In just one day, the average healthy adult heart pumps the equivalent of 2,100 gallons of blood.
The motor behind that movement is your heartbeat. For purposes of measuring the force your heart exerts, experts divide your heartbeat into two phases. When blood is squeezed out of your heart, that’s called your systolic pressure- the first number in your blood pressure equation. When your heart relaxes and refills with blood, that’s called diastolic pressure, the second number. A reading of 120/80 millimeters of mercury (120 over 80) is considered normal. Experts say that a reading above 140/90 should be of concern. And when your blood pressure is higher than 160/100, it’s definitely a problem, says Dr. Thomas Pickering of the Hypertension Center at New York Hospital.
Here’s where it gets weird. When that pressure rises higher than normal, the ever-protective lining of your arteries, called the endothelium, can’t keep plaque and other bits of blood debris from entering the vessel wall. The result: Before long, plaque starts to build up, clogging your arteries and blood vessels, says Dr. Robert DiBianco of Washington Adventist Hospital.
High blood pressure also strains your heart. Given the right stress- say, running or some other form of aerobic exercise -your heart will grow so that it can pump more blood. Not so when you have high blood pressure. Instead, your heart just gets thicker, which down the road can cause your heart to outgrow its blood supply. And this makes it more susceptible to narrowing of the arteries that supply blood to the heart, Dr. Pickering says.
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