Mona Khanna: Hypertension is also known as high blood pressure. What that means is that your blood are not as resilient perhaps as they used to be and now when the blood is going through the blood vessels, much as you have water going through pipes in your house, then the pressure is getting higher and higher and that is dangerous to many of the organs in your body.
Well as we age we have a tendency to have our blood pressure get higher anyway because our blood vessels are older and there is always some wear and tear, they coming less resilient. The question is though if your blood pressure exceeds what the guidelines are and that is if it is higher than 140 over 90 and normal blood pressure is 120 over 80 or less. So if you are between 120 over 80 or 140 over 90 you are actually in a pre high blood pressure state. We like to keep blood pressures less than 120 over 80.
The consequences of having high blood pressure are many. High blood pressure can affect almost every organ in the body, but the ones that are almost commonly affected and have the most severe consequences are going to be your eyes. You can develop vision problems. Also your heart. High blood pressure can lead to an enlargement of the heart and that makes the heart less able to function normally. It can also affect your kidneys, in fact uncontrolled high blood pressure is the reason that most people in dialysis centers have to now have dialysis to help their bodies clean out their blood, which is the function that normal kidneys can do. Because the kidney damage has been so, so bad and the very last consequence is severe consequence of high blood pressure is a stroke. You can actually have a blood vessel in your brain burst or there can be a clot and that can lead to very severe consequences like loss of consciousness and loss of one side or all of your body.
We know exactly what the risk factors are for developing hypertension and there are some that can be controlled and some that is completely out of your control. The ones that you can't do anything about are your sex. We know that men have a tendency to develop high blood pressure at younger ages, were as women have a tendency to develop high blood pressure after the age of 60. You can't do anything about that nor can you do anything about your family history. If high blood pressure runs in your family, well guess what, that's going to be a risk factor for you. What you can control though and what we like to focus on are obesity, keep your weight at a normal average weight. Make sure you have enough physical activity, activity and exercise that helps negate getting high blood pressure. Make sure you keep your stress levels down because we know that higher stress leads to possibly developing high blood pressure directly and then last of all is salt. The more salt that you use on your food, added salt it raise your sodium levels in your body and that tends to retain fluid and that's another risk factor for developing high blood pressure.
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