Common Causes Of Hypertension

High blood pressure or the Hypertension is often described as a silent killer, and affects around 50 million Americans. Hypertension or high blood pressure usually occurs without any visible symptoms, but if the blood pressure gets really high that people could develop headache, dizziness, blurred vision, ringing in the ears or nose bleeds. Most of the people can often find out that they have high blood pressure by getting a routine blood pressure check, which can be done in any doctor's clinic, or which people can do more easily and cheaply by themselves at most pharmacies.

If remain untreated around 30% of people with high blood pressure do not know they have it can quietly damage their organs and set the course for other life-threatening diseases to develop, including stroke, heart disease, and kidney failure. Hypertension or high blood pressure happens when the body holds on to too much water, which increases the volume of blood in our heart, arteries and veins, and therefore increases the pressure against the walls of the heart and blood vessels. Sometimes the heart beats too rapidly and that too can increase the pressure. Either conditions leads to high blood pressure, which over time causes damage to the blood vessels. Blood pressure is normally measured in units of millimeters of mercury (mm Hg), which is the amount of atmospheric pressure required to support a column of mercury 1 millimeter high.

Blood pressure has a number for different systolic and diastolic blood pressure. The systolic pressure rate is the pressure in the vessels when the heart beats, should be less than 140 mm Hg. The diastolic pressure is the pressure in between heart beats, should be less than 90 mm Hg. Like any other heart disease, hypertension or high blood pressure is a disease of modern civilization. Hypertension is a result of the way our bodies have evolved over the centuries to be able to retain water and avoid dehydration. We tend to retain salt like sodium chloride, or NaCl, because, prior to modern times, salt was relatively rare. When these salts are retained in the blood vessels, it holds on to water by something called the osmotic effect, and therefore water is not excreted as much as it would be otherwise through the kidneys and into the urine. Not every people are sensitive to salt to the same degree; there is, however, no doubt that the population as a whole eats much more salt than in the past, probably at least two or three times as much, and these habits are having an adverse effect on the health, including raising blood pressure.

Since early times man did not have easy access to salt, they did not have to worry about eating too many salted potato chips and having the blood pressure go through the roof. The fact is that salt retention served a significant purpose to early man and it was a good thing if people were living on the savannah and wouldn't be eating or drinking for several hours. It is actually not good if people live in America in the 21st Century and eat fast food three times a day.

• Juliana Breckinridge
• 10/03/2009, 8:59 PM
• 0 Comments