According to Harvard Medical School, controlling high blood pressure is a good thing—unless you are a frail older person. Then it might be harmful. That’s the surprising finding of a study of more than 2,000 seniors published online in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
Make no mistake: high blood pressure is a definite health hazard. It damages arteries in the heart, kidneys, and throughout the body, leading to heart attack, heart failure, stroke, kidney failure, and other serious health problems. That’s why many doctors recommend aggressive steps for lowering high blood pressure.
But as we are learning about other conditions, a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work. What is right for controlling blood pressure in a 50-year-old might not work for a frail 80-year-old.
Now, if you have normal pressure, you might want to change some lifestyle habits in time to avoid such problems at old age and protect the heart so that you will be overall healthy.
Don’t be confused – the blood pressure if too high is really a deadly possibility; it damages arteries in the heart, damages kidneys, leads to heart attack, heart failure, kidney failure, stroke, and others.
So according to this, there are treatments for lowering this pressure, but they are even too aggressive. So, many doctors because of this have to recommend drastic steps as such, for lowering the pressure.
However, some new research showed that there is no one universal treatment good for everyone. This means that a 50-year-old person and an 80-year-old person might need different treatments.
Diagnosis for High-Blood Pressure
As to the American Heart Association, start from 20 years of age, the blood pressure is below 120/80 mm Hg, and it is good to do a screening for the pressure at your doctor’s office and once in 2 years is enough.
Every heartbeat elevates the pressure and lowers if the heart is relaxed in between each beat.
So, the pressure varies each second and minute depending on activity, posture, stress or overwhelming situations, sleep and the normal value should be 120/80 mm Hg (less compared to 120 systolic and less than 80 diastolic) for adults (older than 20 years of age). The outcome results were that 1 in 3 US citizens has hypertension.
Just one analyzing and reading doesn’t mean that you have hypertension.
If your blood tension result is higher than it should be, the doctor can advise you furthermore before official diagnosis and treatment.
Nonetheless, if the results are still at 140/90 mm Hg or higher (systolic 140 and more OR diastolic 90 and more) with the time you have to make major lifestyle changes and also to add – if you have a reading result of 140/90 and more, you will be prescribed with meds.
Now, if by any chance you get a systolic result of 180 mm Hg and more, and diastolic of 110 mm Hg or more during blood pressure check, just measure again.
If the second time the result is the same, ask for immediate urgent medical help!