Home Blood Pressure Test Indicates Heart Attack and Stroke Risk

There is a simple way to measure your blood pressure that indicates with amazing accuracy how likely you are to suffer stroke or heart attack.

All it takes is three minutes and a normal blood pressure monitor.

But most doctors don’t do this test (even if they take your blood pressure). In fact, most doctors don’t know about this test because it has just been revealed in a new study.

The good news: You can do this test yourself, using your home blood pressure monitor.

In April 2016, a research team led by academics at the University of Exeter published a large, long-term study on the inaccuracy of single arm blood pressure tests in the British Journal of General Practice.

They followed 3,350 Scottish men and women between ages 50 and 75 over a ten-year period between 1998 and 2008.

At the beginning of the study, they were all classified as at-risk of high blood pressure, but without having been officially diagnosed.

The researchers tested their blood pressure from both arms only once, at the beginning of the study. They then watched to see which people would develop cardiovascular disease.

Those whose two arms yielded a difference in systolic reading of five mmHg and above were almost twice as likely to die of a heart related disease as those were whose arms yielded approximately the same reading.

This is not the worst of it, however.

A whole 60 percent of their participants displayed this five mmHg difference in inter-arm readings. Even worse, 38 percent of them yielded over 10 mmHg difference.

Why do the two arms of the same person give different blood pressure results?

This is not just a simple case of your blood pressure readings differing from one time to the next, such as the reading in a doctor’s office that is often higher than at home because you feel anxious about being examined.

The problem here is that your arms yields different readings even when measured at the same time.

The most common cause of an inter-arm blood pressure difference is the blockage of blood vessels that move blood to the arm with the higher reading.

You can see how this indicates a rather serious cardiovascular problem.

It might mean the plaque has built up only in the arm with the higher readings, or it might indicate that the plaque has spread through most blood vessels throughout your body, excluding those in the arm with the lower readings. If the latter is the case, you are already in serious trouble, whereas the former indicates that you may be on your way to big trouble.

Researchers have made this point before. In the March 2014 edition of the American Journal of Medicine, a Harvard research team published a study in which they took the blood pressure of 3,400 people and observed their cardiovascular health for the subsequent 14 years.

Ten percent of their participants had an inter-arm difference of 10 or more mmHg, and they were 38 percent more likely to have a heart attack or stroke than people with a smaller difference.

Therefore, next time you visit a doctor, demand a double-arm test and astonish them with your sophisticated medical knowledge.

Or better yet, take your blood pressure three times per day. And do it with both arms.

If the average difference between left and right arm systolic blood pressure readings (the higher number) is more than 5 points and especially if it’s higher than 10 points, you absolutely must take action now.

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