UKC

Hey folks, just measured my blood pressure for the first time for a while and it's quite the shocker.

166 over 101 tested on two occasions - hypertension stage 2 apparently.

I'm pretty fit and active, run normally over 20 miles per week and walk at least that again with the dog.

I drink too much, eat too much salt and some of the bad stuff and have a stressful job too.

Am I going to croak?

Edit: croak soon?

Absolutely definitely*

*at some point

How many times do you take it at a sitting?

I've got into the habit of taking it 3 times with a minute between each and averaging the result. Various GPs and nurses have approved of doing it this way.

 But if you end up on medication to control it, it's not the end of the world.

Just done it twice with a couple of minutes between. 

Regulate your breathing and think chilled out thoughts - sounds corny but it can work. I was sceptical about it during a pre-op for my nephrectomy but the nurse was fairly adamant I had to do it . I chose Palombaggia in Corsica.

Having high blood pressure for short periods of time is not that bad. There's a study which looked at blood pressure during heavy weight lifting and recorded blood pressures up to 345/245 ... and their arteries didn't explode at the time. 

...but high blood pressure over a long period (like years and years) is awful and causes damage to just about every organ. Kidney and heart failure, and I think the most scary, dementia. So the really good news is that now is absolutely the time to do something and make some empowering choices. Entirely fixable with life style and diet changes. Do you want to still be out in the hills when you're 94 like Marcel Remy -  youtube.com/watch?v=NUJnZeCc7Hw& or have long died in a nursing home. Think about that when you reach for the salt! 

Assuming it's a true reading and not a blip due to stress or whitecoat hypertension or whatever 

Happened to me. At 50, Dr took my blood pressure for the first time in 20 odd years, and it was high. Always thought I was perfectly fit and healthy.

Experimented with a few different kinds of pills to find a cocktail that had the least side effects and now have to take them every day. For ever. Which was a bit disturbing at first.

In reply to Shani:

My diet is average, I'm 46, exercise regularly,  drink too much, slightly over weight, have insomnia...

Here's our story

Mrs profitofdoom has high blood pressure. The consultant put her on Amlodipine and said she would be taking it for life, and also said she could not control her blood pressure by diet or exercise or anything except the medicine (which works for her)

Just our story

Sorry to hear about your blood pressure

I have to have my BP checked when I need a repeat prescription of HRT, and I always have to take 5 or 6 times before I get to an acceptable reading. Thinking peaceful thoughts does help.

I had to visit A&E about a year ago & my blood pressure was very high but put down to the situation. A month or so later I saw my GP about something else & he took my blood pressure which was still high (180 ish) & he prescribed something for hypertension. After a change or two due to side effects I ended up on Amlodipine which was effective & I was led to believe I'd be taking it for the rest of my life.

But as winter arrived I started to feel the cold in my feet & hands much more than in the past, as if I had poor circulation. I discussed this with my GP who agreed that I should stop the treatment, measure my blood pressure daily & see what happened. It went up slightly  at first but has been pretty steady at about 110-120 for a few months now. The big difference is that I have lost weight (from 75 to 60 Kg) and have all but stopped drinking alcohol (occassional small glass on special occassions rather than a couple of glasses of wine with dinner everyday).

Drinks less. That'll help you to lose weight if you are already active and probably go some way to improving your sleeping pattern as well.

Hi there, I’m in the 6th year running a patient study at Royal Derby Hospital to continuously measure BP non invasively during dialysis, and predict hypertension and hypotension episodes. Alongside the kit we’ve developed, we take regular measurements automatically from a brachial arm cuff for calibration, so I’ve literally taken thousands of cuff measurements.

the most important things to take account of are having the cuff at the same height as the heart. Preferably have that arm supported, on a chair arm, and most importantly take at least 5 quiet minutes to relax before measurement.

There are loads of papers quoting 1 minute intervals as being ok and from a physiological point of view is just about ok for the vasculature to recover. The first reading is always high in all the literature, so multiple measurements are best. As a rule of thumb, we work on 5 minute maximum frequency to allow physiology and psych to relax fully, and actually our calibration readings are at 20 minutes frequency currently, so take some time between readings to relax again. Do this over a period of a few days, including weekend, and keep a record.

Finally, at the beginning of treatment, I can always identify someone who has ignored the guidelines over Sodium and alcohol intake since the last session. If your BP remains at the levels you quote, you need to see a GP who will automatically ask you about stress, sodium and alcohol intake and probably BMI. Don’t panic though, this can be sorted.

Interesting stuff. 

So' if you take two readings close together, the first will be high but the second will also be inaccurate because you haven't allowed the vasculature to recover.?

Amplodipine did the same to me and made my feet swell up. Now on a cocktail of amplodipin and benzothyrohydrolide (or something) . Fine for the past 4 years..

Tom, that’s the gist of it. Thinking about it, your body thinks you’ve just lost an arm!

I think the difficulty is it’s always individual specific, and the circulatory recovery and response gets mixed up with patient relaxation and other minor variables like sitting position etc. Taking BP while the patient is prone is absolutely best. 
I have made our predictive software view at least the first BP measurement during a treatment as unreliable in all cases because the drop with the next measurement will be enough to trigger a hypotensive alarm even in a patient prone to hypertension. We then take a trio of cuffs 5 minutes apart, and then go over to 20 minutes. Dialysis treatments are typically 4 hours.

I’m separately measuring pressure in the arterial and venous dialysis lines continuously, which indicate that the Brachial pressure after the first measurement comes down to a more reliable equilibrium at subsequent readings. It is very interesting that it’s possible to observe the effect of each measurement on BP. I’ll write this up into a paper at some point, just drowning in data for other stuff at the moment.

just a caveat here. Dialysis patients tend to have comorbidities to some extent, particularly compromised cardiovascular control so the inaccuracy in the first reading is likely to be larger than the general popn. Nonetheless, our research group of relatively healthy people tend to show the same high readings on first measurement. The more relaxation time before the measurements, the better.

In reply to Shani:

That cold exposure hypertension is a thread in itself! cardiovascular (vasoconstriction, peripheral resistance) and the necessity to moderate (or not, if you go hypertensive) heart rate and stroke volume in response to rising pressure in the Corotid artery. Makes a change from  what has he done on grit😂

In reply to Shani:

Absolutely