The Health Promoter that Causes High Blood PressureResearchers at Australia’s Monash University have discovered a major cause of blood pressure. If they are right, it may lead to a new type of treatment.

The explanation is particularly surprising, because the system that causes it is precisely the one that is supposed to keep us healthy.

Your immune system is a miracle. It manages to identify potentially harmful foreign organisms, after which it naturally produces antibodies to kill them to protect you from them.

To do this, it needs to distinguish successfully between your body’s own cells and organisms from those that come from outside. Remember your cells aren’t uniquely marked as yours. They are exact replicas of the cells in some other organisms.

If your immune system can tell the difference between your own cells and foreign organisms, it can remove those foreign organisms and keep you healthy. If it fails to tell the difference, it will identify some of your own cells as threatening and either destroy them or change their operations. If the cells that it destroys or changes are important, you could become extremely sick or even die.

Through evolution, our immune systems have become quite good at telling the difference between self and other, but occasionally they fail spectacularly. When your immune system attacks your own body in this way, it is an autoimmune disease. These diseases include rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, and multiple sclerosis.

Researchers at Australia’s Monash University have now discovered that high blood pressure may be just another autoimmune disease.

They caused high blood pressure in mice by stimulating certain types of B cells in their immune systems. They then brought their blood pressure down by inhibiting those same B cells.

To build an even stronger case, they bred mice who had very low levels of that type of B cell. Even when subjected the mice to the kind of lifestyle that normally brings about high blood pressure, their blood pressure was not nearly as high as those of normal mice on the same lifestyle.

What is going on here? Are active immune cells not supposed to ensure great health?
This is true in most cases. The stimuli that cause hypertension, like stress, however, make these B cells too active in a situation where there are no foreign organisms to attack. They produce excessive numbers of antibodies that then attack your arteries.

The Australian research team found great numbers of these antibodies inside the walls of the mice’s arteries, where they caused an inflammatory response that hardened and stiffened those arteries. This increased their blood pressure, because their arteries were no longer flexible enough to respond properly to blood flow.

This discovery is important because it suggests that potential treatments can focus on blocking the activity of the B cells that produce antibodies in a situation where threatening foreign organisms are absent. Drugs that do this are already prescribed for people with rheumatoid arthritis, which is caused by a similar B cell overreaction.

This does not free us from the responsibility to adopt healthy lifestyles to prevent high blood pressure, of course. The treatment that blocks the B cells is likely to consist of a synthetic drug with its own side effects and toxicity. Some experts have already warned that the universal blocking of types of B cells is too crude a solution to autoimmune diseases. They are essential immune cells, after all.

It’s also a fact that many lifestyle factors trigger the aggression of these immune cells, so by managing those factors, we can heal our autoimmune diseases naturally.

One of the biggest factors that triggers this is stress. Any kind of stress – be it physical, mental, emotional, or sensory – will trigger this type of stress.

And the best way to lower our stress hormone level and thereby this overreaction of the immune cells, lies in a set of 3 easy blood pressure exercises found here…