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The Ups and Downs of High Blood Pressure
By Dr. Maureen Mays
High blood pressure doesn’t cause painful symptoms, but left untreated it can cause stroke, heart failure, or heart attack. As a caregiver, you probably know it’s important that you help your parents or loved ones control their blood pressure. You also need to make sure your own blood pressure is within normal range. Officially, normal blood pressure is 120/80. Exercise, diet, and the right medications can help control it – and lower the risk factors considerably.
Even if You do Everything Right, Blood Pressure Can Act Up
Some of my patients get crabby about their high blood pressure. Especially those people that do everything right. They eat well, they exercise, they’re fit, they’re not fat, they don’t have diabetes. But still, they have high blood pressure and they’re angry about it. It’s not fair, but you know what they say about life and fairness. Some people are just born with a predisposition to high blood pressure. And quite frankly, we don’t exactly know what causes this. We call it Essential Hypertension. “Essential” is just a fancy word for “We have no clue.”
Birthdays Raise Blood Pressure
As we age, everyone’s blood pressure gets higher. There’s usually a big jump when we reach our 50s. So, even if someone hasn’t had a problem, has always had a great blood pressure reading, they go to the doctor sometime after turning 50 and all of a sudden, they might have high blood pressure. The arteries stiffen as we get older, and if you reach your 80s, the likelihood that you’ll have high blood pressure is almost 100 percent. If your parents or loved ones are getting up there in years, their blood pressure is probably getting up there, too. And if you’ve reached your fifties, you need to keep an eye on your own blood pressure.
The Right Mix of Medications is Key
We also know that several different medications at low doses work better to control blood pressure than taking one medicine at a higher dose. This is another hurdle for people to get over, because people are often resistant to taking – and paying for – a lot of different medications. There are new combination pills that help. Still, most patients need to take more than one pill for hypertension. I tell my patients and I’ll tell you that it’s extremely important to do whatever it takes to keep your parent’s and your own blood pressure in the normal range to help avoid stroke, heart failure and heart attack. It’s worth the inconvenience. It’s worth the extra cost. It’s even worth your parents getting a little crabby about it.
Dr. Maureen Mays is an assistant professor and director of preventive cardiology at Oregon Health & Science University. She received her MD at the University of Nevada School of Medicine and completed her residency in Family Medicine at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Dr. Mays did her fellowship in Preventive Cardiology and Vascular Imaging at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics in Madison. She is a fellow of the American College of Cardiology and a Diplomate of the American Board of Clinical LIpidology.
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