This SMS Text Lowers Your Blood Pressure

What if one simple text could lower your blood pressure 2.2 points?

I know it’s not much, but receiving a text is also not that complicated, right?

A few months ago, researchers at the University of Cape Town and Oxford University published a study in Circulation.

It tested whether medication and clinic appointment reminders via text message increased people’s compliance with their blood pressure treatment and lowered their blood pressure more than just prescribing their treatments did.

They recruited almost 1,300 participants from the poorer areas of Cape Town and divided them into three groups.
1) One group received only their blood pressure treatment,
2) The second received their treatment together with text message reminders to take their medication, attend their scheduled doctor’s appointments, do their exercise, and eat a healthy diet.
3) And the third group received their treatments, the reminders, and the interactive ability to cancel their doctor’s appointments and change the timing of their messages.
Those who received the text messages lost 2.2 mm Hg of systolic blood pressure points more than those who received only their treatments, primarily because a higher number of them took their medication 80 percent or more of the time, 61.2 versus 49.4 percent. The ability to interact and cancel appointments or messages made little difference.

One of the authors stated that the improvement was approximately the same as that expected from one-on-one behavioral counseling, which is considerably more expensive.

Now, I’m not the world’s number one fan of blood pressure medications but I’m fascinated by this study because it can just as well be used to remind us to take natural measures.

One of the problems with our blood pressure exercises, for example, is that people forget to do them. They’re so simple and easy and only take 9 minutes or so. And they work for almost everyone who remembers to do them.

But, in our busy schedules, we forget even the easiest things.

So how about instead of receiving text messages, you’d just put a reminder in your phone that beeped at the same time every day just to remind you to take 9 minutes off to lower your blood pressure?

Or ask your son or daughter to send you a text daily to ask if you did your exercises?

If you want to try this out, here are the easy blood pressure exercises, guaranteed to bring your blood pressure below 120/80 – starting today…