Blood pressure is an important part of our bodies workings. If you have high blood pressure then you are at risk form a stroke or heart attack. So we should have our blood pressure checked at least once per year and more often if you know that there is a history in your family of high blood pressure.
The force of our blood against our arteries as it is pumped by the heart is what is known as our blood pressure. The heart will pump blood around our bodies using our arteries as it beats and this is when the pressure is most which is known as systolic pressure and then the heart has a quick rest before its next pump and this is the lower pressure know as the diastolic ppressure.
There are two numbers that make up your blood pressure reading and a normal blood pressure reading for an average healthy adult would be 120/80 this is spoken as 120 over 80. The 120 is you higher systolic pressure and the 80 is your lower diastolic pressure. Any higher result than this and your blood pressure would be desrcibed by your Doctor as high.
If you got a reading of high blood pressure like 147/98 then you would be at risk from a stroke or worse, so your doctor would want to find out about your lifestyle to to see if they could suggest things that you might want to change to lower your blood pressure and avoid medication. Your Doctor will then monitor your Blood pressure with regular checks until they were happy that your blood pressure was normal.
If your blood pressure is still high then you are in the at risk level when it comes to blood pressure. This is called Hypertension ( High Blood Pressure ) and you will now have to seriously look at your lifestyle to see if you can make healthy changes to bring your blood pressure back to normal and then maintain it at the normal level.
Hypertension can be caused by lifestyle things such as being over weight or smoking although there are many more things that can be the reason for high blood pressure. So if you make some kind of changes to your lifestyle then you are capable of bringing down your blood pressure.
The alternative to bringing down high blood pressure naturally by lifestyle changes is medication. Your Doctor may decide that you will have to take drugs to lower your blood pressure to the normal level.There are plenty of different blood pressure medications to choose from.
With Medication comes possible side effects, so it is worth putting the effort into trying to lower your blood pressure without drugs.
Hypertension the silent killer. If you don’t want to be walking around with high blood pressure and therefore at risk, because you may not know you have it as there aren’t always symptoms then get your blood pressure checked sooner rather than later.