Blood pressure is the pressure of your blood in the arteries as the heart pumps it around the body, and just like a motor sometimes needs a bit of attention to its working parts, so does your heart.
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So why do they call blood pressure the silent killer? It’s largely a symptomless condition.
Usually your blood pressure has to be very, very high before you feel any symptoms, 180 or higher over 110, however, even moderate blood pressure is doing you damage they say.
If you have persistently high blood pressure it contributes to the development of vascular (blood vessel) disease which can lead to heart attack and stroke.
Our heart is a pump that beats 100,000 times a day and if it has to pump out against increasing pressure, we are flogging our heart to death and putting our pipes (arteries) under unnecessary pressure.
The good news is that it’s easy to detect and often easy to fix. Your doctor usually needs to record a number of blood pressure readings before they diagnose you with hypertension or high blood pressure.
But your blood pressure can be tricky; it can go up because of a situation, your general poor health, or a bit of stress.
But what do those numbers 120/80 really mean? It means 120 units of pressure in your arteries when your heart is pumping and 80 units of pressure in your arteries when your heart is at rest.
The medical profession say they fractionalise the numbers, put one on top of the other, and don’t tell us what it means. But now you know and there’s no excuse.
