There is High Blood Pressure, and Then There is Even More Dangerous Blood Pressure Everyone knows that high blood pressure puts people at risk of heart failure, stroke, and other potentially fatal conditions.

Researchers are only now starting to realize that there is a related condition that may kill even more people.

This is disturbing, because it means preventing high blood pressure is not quite enough.

An article by British researchers in the March, 2010 edition of the Lancet medical journal concluded that people with systolic blood pressure that varied from one doctor’s visit to the next were at much higher risk of stroke than those who simply had high blood pressure.

While their study participants all suffered from high blood pressure, those whose scores changed the most between low and high suffered the most strokes, especially if the highest point was very high.

Remember that your systolic blood pressure is the higher of the two numbers on your blood pressure reading. It measures the pressure of the blood pumped from your heart into your arteries. If normal blood pressure is 120 over 80, systolic is 120.

An article that will be published in the September, 2015 edition of the Annals of Internal Medicine is even more alarming than the Lancet study. An impressive 25,814 patients with high blood pressure were subjected to repeated readings over a period of 22 months. They were subsequently monitored for almost three years to find out who suffered the most strokes and heart attacks.

Those with the largest variations between readings had a 30% greater risk of suffering a heart attack, a 46% greater risk of suffering a stroke, and a 25% greater risk of suffering from heart failure.

As if this is not bad enough, those with a higher than 14 point variation in the systolic reading were 58% more likely to have died than those with smaller variations. In other words, if your blood pressure sometimes reads, for example, 130/90 and sometimes 150/100, you are 58% more likely to die in the next three years than someone with stable high readings.

One thing that the researchers do not know yet is the direction of the causal relationship. Does highly variable blood pressure cause the cardiovascular conditions, or are there other conditions already present that are causing the highly variable blood pressure.

This is important because, if the highly variable readings are caused by some third health condition, researchers must try to discover this deadly condition very soon.
If, on the other hand, the unpredictable levels cause the heart attacks and strokes, researchers should develop a treatment that keeps blood pressure consistent, as opposed to just lowering it.

The bottom line is, however, that high blood pressure needs to be managed. You need to get it down, whether it’s spiking or not.

The simplest and most effective way to drop blood pressure naturally is a set of extremely easy blood pressure exercises. Try these blood pressure exercises out for yourself here…