Is Your Good Health Giving You High Blood Pressure? (weird)

In a recent study, Dr. Paul Marvar from Emory University made a strange discovery, which was published in the journal Experimental Physiology.

Seems like one of the cornerstone factors of good health is also a major cause of high blood pressure.

In fact, without this health-factor, you might be unable to develop high blood pressure. But you’d suffer devastating consequences.

The researchers started from the well-established facts that chronic psychological stress is bad for the immune system and contribute to high blood pressure.

This made them wonder about the role that the immune system plays in stress-dependent blood pressure; i.e. the cases of elevated blood pressure caused by psychological stress.

The primary cells through which the immune system works are t-cells. T-cells are white blood cells that circulate throughout our blood streams, look for viruses, bacteria, and other things with abnormal cellular structures, and kill or remove them. They are absolutely crucial for good health. These are the cells that HIV sufferers lack.

Dr. Marvar first genetically engineered mice that lacked T-cells. He then subjected these mice and normal mice to psychological stress by first confining them to small spaces and then putting them in other mice’s dirty cages. Don’t laugh, living in other people’s dirty houses stress many humans too!

Two hours per day of this stress for a week lead to a big rise in the mice’s blood pressure; but interestingly, only for those with T-cells. The blood pressure of those without T-cells remained the same, notwithstanding the stress.

When Dr. Marvar put the T-cells back into the genetically engineered mice, their blood pressure became sensitive to psychological stress again.

This is not the first study of its kind. Dr. David Harrison, who moved to Emory University in 2011 and assisted Dr. Marvar with this study, previously found that blood pressure couldn’t rise without T-cells in response to excessive dietary salt intake either.

At this stage, they do not understand why blood pressure remains normal in the absence of T-cells, and they would have to do substantially more research before a treatment can be developed. After all, removing our T-cells to control our blood pressure will allow the first opportunistic viral or bacterial infection to kill us.

The critical outcome of this study, though, is that stress is one of the main contributors of high blood pressure.

The 3 easy blood pressure exercises found here fight stress and other causes of high blood pressure (without hurting your immune system), bringing it down to 120/80 – starting today…