High blood pressure can hurt your body in different ways. Most importantly, is the strain it puts on your heart and arteries. If your heart works harder than normal for a long time, it can get bigger, and an enlarged heart can have a hard time keeping up with your body’s needs.
Of all the people in the United States with high blood pressure:
- 11 percent aren’t doing anything about it — no special diet, no medication.
- 25 percent are on therapy for it, but aren’t doing enough.
- Only 34 percent of people with high blood pressure are doing enough — either diet, medication, or both.
Although the cause of high blood pressure isn’t always clearly known, hypertension is easy to detect and generally controllable. Good thing, because hypertension is the number one changeable risk factor for stroke. High blood pressure also can lead to things like heart attack, heart failure, kidney failure, and fatty buildup in the arteries. And speaking of arteries, high blood pressure can speed up the natural artery hardening that happens as we age. Hardened and/or narrowed arteries don’t carry as much blood, which can damage your organs. You may also be at risk for a blood clot getting lodged in a narrowed or hardened artery, cutting off a part of the blood supply completely.
As you age, even smaller changes in blood pressure can increase your risk of heart disease and stroke. Between the ages of 40 and 89, your heart disease and stroke risk doubles for every increase of 20 mm Hg systolic pressure or 10 mm Hg diastolic pressure.
By lowering your blood pressure, you can reduce your risk of stroke by forty percent. Your risk of heart attack goes down by a quarter, and your risk of heart failure goes down by half. Talk to your doctor if you think you’re at risk for high blood pressure, or if your numbers have been consistently high. High blood pressure may not be able to be cured completely, but it can usually be managed.