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High Blood Pressure Englisch |
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Your doctor is talking about high blood pressure or hypertension when he finds your pressure being higher than 140/90 mmHg. Values from 140/90 to 160/ 95 are considered borderline, anything higher means high blood pressure in any case. The first number is considered the systolic pressure, this corresponds to the pressure that the heart has to build to eject its blood volume into the body. The second number is called diastolic pressure and its equivalent is the resistance of the blood vessels. Hypertension can be the elevation of either one of those values or both.
The reasons for hypertension can be manifold, in more than 90% of the cases we are talking about „essential hypertension", this means the exact causes are still unknown. A genetic connection seems to exist more than half of the time, other factors seem to be nutrition ( being overweight, high sodium consumption) and the hormone status.
Why is hypertension being treated?
In lots of patients hypertension is being discovered only by chance, that means the patient itself does not have any complaints. This makes it hard fore some patients to see the need for therapy. It is important to know that non-treated hypertension can lead to various alterations at different organs, almost half of the patients develop arteriosclerosis that is a change in the wall of smaller arteries for example in the eye ground, in the kidneys or in cerebral vessel leading to late complications like rethinopathy and retinal detachment, strokes because of thrombosis and decreasing kidney function. On long term base the heart is being loaded too much with consequences like angina and myocardial infarct.
How is hypertension being treated?
There are several different types of products for treatment of hypertension at our disposal, that act in many different ways. Sometimes combinations of two ore three different products are being prescribed. For some patients this may seem exaggerated considering the fact that they do not feel any complaints, but it is important to remember the harm that a non-treated hypertension can lead to. During therapy stay in contact with your doctor and inform him about any complaints you have so that he can help you. If your hypertension is being present for several years, you should have regular check ups with your oculist in order to detect any changes in the eye ground in time.
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