Overview Of High Blood Pressure

Dr Shepps book, Mayo Clinic on Blood Pressure, describes how to be on charge and protect yourself from hypertension. This includes understanding ways to be safe, preventing, treating and taking preventive steps in adjusting and maintaining the human body.

Health is important in all living organisms especially humans. They can take care of themselves when they have psychological and mental changes. Humans are able to adapt with the ambient they live around. Taking care and having a good health with balanced mixture of four humors is the most significant issue now days. Among them is also managing the High Blood Pressure (HBP). HBP is a major cause of deaths in the United States (Sheps, 1999). Some researchers have shown that treating hypertension in elderly and changes in lifestyle can switch to a lower Blood Pressure (BP) (Sheps, 1999).

HBP (hypertension) is described as High Pressure (HP) with tension in the veins, which are the vessels that carry blood from the heart to the rest of the body. HP is defined as systolic and/or diastolic BP ≥140/90 mmHg and low under 90/60 mmHg (Sheps, 1999). One of the most dangerous aspects of hypertension is that patients may not know they have it, and this is the reason that kills many people afflicted with it. (Sheps, 1999). There are many reasons why people are not aware of their HP related health conditions.

A major reason is that the disease generally doesn’t produce any symptoms until it has progressed to an advanced stage. According to Sheps (1999), it is a leading of heart failure, kidney failure, stroke and the majority cause of deaths. If people don’t take it seriously, it can shorten their life by ten to twenty years. One in four adults in the United States has HBP. An estimated fifty million American adults have HBP (Sheps, 1999). It’s important to inform and educate people about this disease.

Based on the person’s background, there are many risk factors associated with HBP. According to Sheps (1999), we have essential and secondary HBP, unmodified and modified risk factors. Essential HBP is affected by unmodified risk factors that are race, age, family history, sex, and modified risk factors that are obesity, inactivity, tobacco, sodium sensitivity, low potassium, excessive alcohol, stress, some diseases like sleep apnea, high cholesterol, diabetes and congestive heart failure. In addition, HBP occurs more often in blacks—41% of black adults compared with 28% of whites and 28% of Mexican Americans (Sheps, 1999). It also occurs with high frequency in people with Asian origin. (Sheps, 1999). Left untreated HBP can lead to significant consequences.

The consequences of HBP are worse for people of color. HBP occurs more often in older people. People who have normal BP at age 55 have a 90% risk of developing HBP at some point in their life (Bakris, 2014). HBP is twice as common among people who are obese as those who are not (Bakris, 2014). From this information, we know that people of color are more affected than white people, also the percentage of older people is higher compared with other ages. Young people who suffer from HBP are usually sick with other illnesses (Bakris, 2014). Since some of the factors can be modified, people can change their lifestyles before the development of this diseases and causes.

Causes of secondary HBP are kidney disease, adrenal disease, thyroid disease, blood vessel abnormalities, pregnancy, medications and use of illegal drugs (Sheps,1999). It’s important that people change the lifestyle, for example, if they don’t use salt, tobacco or alcohol too much, they will prevent this sickness. But in other cases, it is very important not to discontinue the medication in order to prevent this illness. The American Heart Association (AHA) mentioned some of the symptoms are headaches, blood spots in the eyes, facial flushing, dizziness, shortness of breath and nosebleeds (AHA). Patients can help control their symptoms of HBP by taking medications, and adding to their daily routine diet (a lot of vegetables), exercises, and weight loss and changing the unhealthy lifestyle.

If people are familiar with this disease through education, they will avoid many complications. We can avoid many severe complications and many other effects that can cause BP.