There is High Blood Pressure, and Then There is An Even More Dangerous Form of Blood Pressure

Everyone knows that high blood pressure puts you at risk of heart failure, stroke, and other potentially fatal conditions.

However, researchers are beginning to realize that there is a related condition, which may kill even more people.

This is disturbing, because it would mean that 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, particularly those that varied from one doctor’s visit to the next, were at a much higher risk of stroke than those who simply had high blood pressure.

While the study participants all suffered from high blood pressure, those whose scores changed the most between low and high suffered the most strokes, particularly if the highest point was extremely 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 the normal blood pressure is 120 over 80, then systolic would be the 120.

An article published in the September 2015 edition of the Annals of Internal Medicine had a more alarming than the findings of 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.

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

One thing that the researchers are not able to 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 would need to discover this deadly condition very soon.

If, on the other hand, the unpredictable levels are the cause of the heart attacks and strokes, researchers should develop a treatment that keeps blood pressure consistent, as opposed to just lowering it.

However, the bottom line is 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 easy blood pressure exercises. Try these blood pressure exercises out for yourself right here…