Imagine a dramatic scene where a father is discussing with one of his sons; he’s getting furious. The son is more like doesn’t care for what his father is saying; the father gets more and more angry. And suddenly, the father holds his head and screams: “my blood pressure is coming over. Someone gets me my pill Now!”
So dramatic, isn’t it? This scene could be inspired by many old movies that had been consumed thousands of times, though symptoms of high blood pressure are more likely to lead to many dangerous complications that would add an additional risk, which invites us to discuss symptoms of high blood pressure and its complications in details throughout this article.
First of all, let’s know more about blood pressure in general and when it could be diagnosed as hypertension.
While measuring the blood pressure, it would give us two readings, the top and bottom numbers. The top refers to the systolic blood pressure, and the bottom refers to the diastolic blood pressure.
What’s high systolic blood pressure?
Systolic blood pressure is measured during the heart contractions and shows the blood flow circulation into the blood vessels. The ultimate measure of systolic blood pressure is signified by 120 mmHg.
What’s high diastolic blood pressure?
The diastolic blood pressure shows the blood circulation into blood vessels during the heart muscle relaxation, and it’s considered high when it overcomes 80 mmHg.
Normal blood pressure varies according to many factors, and it’s diagnosed as hypertension when it transgresses a certain reading, not necessarily when being right over the perfect reading.
For example, is a blood pressure of 150 mmHg considered high blood pressure?
The absolute answer is yes. However, it should be measured several times along a significant time span and determine whether it’s a constant state or it’s getting lower with time. In case it’s fixed at this high reading for a long time, the specialist doctor would diagnose it as hypertension.
You can read this article to learn more details about the symptoms of high blood pressure, its causes, and low blood pressure as well.
Symptoms of High Blood Pressure
Symptoms of high blood pressure could vary between each patient according to many factors into consideration. Not to mention that someone could be suffering from hypertension without having any clue; in fact, symptoms of high blood pressure come silently most of the time.
Out of these points, it comes to our conscious how important the periodic measurement of blood pressure is. This allows us to monitor and keep tracking its levels all the way and take action once it’s getting higher than normal for a long time, which keeps us away from any dangerous complications.
Alternatively, symptoms of high blood pressure are various and could be clear in many cases, and could be detected as follows:
– Hard breathing
– Constant headache
– Nose bleeding and this symptom could be a clue to a severe blood pressure that could clearly affect the patient’s safety.
On a parallel inquiry, it’s known that low blood pressure could also lead to a headache, which arouses the following question: how to detect the difference?
If the headache is included in symptoms of high blood pressure, it usually hits both head sides. Moreover, the low-pressure headache would disappear when laying down and get harder while sitting or standing up.
High Blood Pressure Types
Basically, there’re two main types describing symptoms of high blood pressure, primary and secondary hypertension types. Accordingly, we can spread out each type causes as follows:
– Primary high blood pressure
It hits adults with no clear reason, and scientists are blindfolded concerning any of these reasons. It’s most probably related to aging as one of the geriatric signs and diseases.
– Secondary high blood pressure
It occurs as a consequence of another event or moment. It comes out of the blue with no pre-signs. Normally, it has higher levels than the primary type.
For instance, many health conditions could lead to the secondary type of hypertension, between which we can mention the following:
– Obstructive sleep apnea
– Kidney diseases
– Adrenal gland tumors
– Thyroid problems
– It could be due to some blood vessel congenital flaw.
– Many pills and medicines could lead to the second type of high blood pressure, such as birth control pills, cold remedies, many pain killers, and decongestants.
– Doing drugs can also lead to the secondary type of hypertension.
Having no symptoms of high blood pressure makes it harder to detect and more likely to go through its complications. These complications are way more serious than just having a severe headache.
Therefore, we’ll show through the next lines the main hypertension complications that greatly affect the patient’s health safety.
High Blood Pressure Complications
Whether there are clear symptoms of high blood pressure or not, it certainly would lead to such complications if not contained and dealt with properly.
These complications are numerous and variable and could be mentioned as follows:
– Heart attacks & strokes
Symptoms of high blood pressure could lead to hardening and thickening of the arteries, which could block the normal blood flow into these arteries, increasing the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
– Aneurysm
Having symptoms of blood pressure for long times with no actions made to have it under control would weaken and bulge the blood vessels, which will certainly lead to an aneurysm, and increase the risk of a blood vessel rupture that could be life-threatening.
– Heart failure
Pumping the blood against an already high pressure is exhausting, which requires more effort and heart work to realize a thing, which could lead to a higher heart rate and causes the walls of the heart’s chamber to thicken. Constantly, these thick walls would put the extra required pressure on the heart muscle to pump enough blood to the whole body, eventually leading to heart failure.
– Weak or narrow kidney blood vessels
This blood pressure disruption could affect the arteries feeding the kidneys and would cause them to get narrower and block them from functioning normally.
– Thick, narrow, or torn eye blood vessels
To understand how the symptoms of high blood pressure could be serious, this one could be more likely to happen to cause total blindness.
– Troubles in memory and conscious
Uncontrolled symptoms of high blood pressure could be one of the main causes that lead to trouble remembering and having focus issues; it could also affect the thinking process and decision-making.
– Dementia
Due to constant symptoms of high blood pressure, arteries and blood vessels feeding the brain could get narrower, which leads to brain cell damage, in the long run, leading to dementia.
– Sexual dysfunction
In fact, symptoms of high blood pressure could affect the sexual ability of both men and women, as it could lead to erectile dysfunction for men and lower sexual desire for women.
– Angina
Moreover, symptoms of high blood pressure could higher the risk of angina, as the heart muscle can no longer resist hypertension, which blocks the amount of blood reaching the heart and causes angina.
Symptoms of High Blood Pressure & Cholesterol Relation
High blood pressure would affect the cholesterol levels in an unhealthy way, causing many more complications with a wider effect.
In fact, symptoms of high blood pressure have a direct effect on the body’s metabolism that causes obesity in one way or another. However, the real problem lies when it affects cholesterol levels.
For instance, symptoms of high blood pressure could lower the high-density lipoprotein (HDL), the good cholesterol; in contrast, the higher the low-density lipoprotein (LDL), the bad cholesterol.
As a result, the patient could be facing another high risk of having diabetes, strokes, and anginas.
Due to several symptoms of high blood pressure and yet many more complications, it’s better to know solutions and ways to face such a danger that’s not far from us.
High blood pressure Treatment
How to face it? It’s a worthy question. It’s not something far from us that symptoms of Hypertension are pretty common around our communities, especially for those who are over the 40s and increasingly hitting the elderly.
However, up to this moment, we don’t have a remedy or a cure for such a disease. Yet many attitudes are meant to reduce its danger and put it under control. In fact, after being diagnosed doctor would give a prescription for the patient to follow, and most probably, it’ll be something to follow for a lifetime.
Though, many other acts and actions could be made to help control the symptoms of high blood pressure, which are also the way of prevention in the first place.
Such actions could be concluded in a few little points as follows:
– Workout, practice any kind of sport daily (for at least 45 minutes)
– Avoid high-salted meals (dried fish)
– Increase vegetables and fruits intake in a massive way
– Drink enough amounts of water daily
– Keep tracking and measuring blood pressure periodically, especially for people over 40.
You can check this article for more information about the symptoms of high blood pressure and how to face them.
Facing Hypertension Using Certain Drinks
Doubtless, facing the symptoms of high blood pressure is more than just following a certain home prescription; some drinks could be highly useful to reduce the risk or help put it under control.
Some of the helping drinks that could be mentioned are:
– Berry Juice: contains flavonoid components that can help control blood pressure levels.
– Red Beet Juice: contains nitric oxide that helps enlarge blood vessels, reducing blood pressure.
– Pomegranate Juice can help reduce systolic blood pressure by 30%.
– Dairy: many studies point to the symptoms of high blood pressure being due to a lack of calcium, which could be compensated through the milk and dairy products.
– Water: it’s fair enough to know that drinking enough amounts of water daily could help keep normal blood pressure levels.
