How does high blood pressure affect your health?

How does high blood pressure affect your health?

The good news is that, in most cases, you can manage your blood pressure to lower your risk for serious health problems. High blood pressure can damage your arteries by making them less elastic, which decreases the flow of blood and oxygen to your heart and leads to heart disease. In addition, decreased blood flow to the heart can cause:

What are the risk factors for high blood pressure?

Certain health conditions, such as diabetes and having obesity, can also increase the risk for developing high blood pressure. High blood pressure can also happen during pregnancy. You can manage your blood pressure to lower your risk for serious health problems that may affect your heart, brain, kidneys, and eyes.

How does high blood pressure cause a stroke?

High blood pressure damages arteries throughout the body, creating conditions where they can burst or clog more easily. Weakened arteries in the brain, resulting from high blood pressure, put you at a much higher risk for stroke — which is why managing high blood pressure is critical to reduce your chance of having a stroke.

What does it mean when your blood pressure is higher than normal?

What is high blood pressure (hypertension)? High blood pressure, also called hypertension, is blood pressure that is higher than normal. Your blood pressure changes throughout the day based on your activities. Having blood pressure measures consistently above normal may result in a diagnosis of high blood pressure (or hypertension).

What are the dangers of high blood pressure?

High blood pressure can enlarge the wall of a weakened artery and cause aneurysm, which can lead to serious internal bleeding, in case of rupture. Another danger of high blood pressure is kidney failure caused by the damage to the large arteries leading to these organs and the smaller blood vessels inside the kidneys.

What diseases cause high blood pressure?

Health conditions that can cause high blood pressure include: kidney disease. diabetes. long-term kidney infections. obstructive sleep apnoea – where the walls of the throat relax and narrow during sleep, interrupting normal breathing.

What is the risk factor of high blood pressure?

Common hereditary and physical risk factors for high blood pressure include: Family history. If your parents or other close blood relatives have high blood pressure, there’s an increased chance that you’ll get it, too. Age. The older you are, the more likely you are to get high blood pressure.

What is high blood pressure, and how is it diagnosed?

High blood pressure used to be diagnosed at a measurement of 140/90 millimeters of mercury (mm Hg) or higher . Now these authorities state that if your blood pressure is 130/80 mm Hg or higher, you have hypertension. A normal blood pressure measurement is the same as it was before: less than 120/80 mm Hg.