What Is Blood Pressure and Why Should I Care About It?

Blood pressure is a measure of the force produced by the heart pumping as it pumps blood through the body's blood vessels. Blood vessels called arteries are the routes that send blood to all organs of the body. When the heart pumps, blood is pushed out of the heart into the artery. This pressure when the heart contracts is called systolic blood pressure. As the heart relaxes after each contraction, the pressure in the heart decreases and the valve opens to allow blood to enter the main pump chamber [ventricle]. This is called diastolic blood pressure. A typical pressure is 120/80, where 120 represents the “systolic” pressure when the heart contracts and 80 represents the “diastolic” pressure when the heart relaxes. These pressures are measured in millimeters of mercury, abbreviated as “mmHg”.

High pressure [“hypertension”] pays attention to these numbers because it can damage blood vessels [from large arteries such as the aorta to small arterioles that go to very small capillaries]. Although high blood pressure can damage all arteries, it can cause particularly significant disruption to the heart, brain, kidneys, and eye arteries. If the blood is too high, the force of the blood can directly damage the blood vessels, causing problems such as heart attacks, strokes, kidney failure, blindness, and actual vascular rupture. Therefore, pay attention to high pressure because you want to prevent all these problems. By fixing other risk factors such as high cholesterol, excess weight, high sugar, and smoking, and controlling blood pressure over the years, arteries avoid damage and patients tend to be better.

There are two misconceptions about high pressure [“hypertension”]. First, many think that when doctors mention "high blood pressure" we are talking about anxious people [too tense]. It is true that anxiety and stress can raise blood and cause high blood pressure, but the term “high blood pressure” does not refer to a person who is tense. People who are completely calm may still suffer from high blood pressure.

Second, many people think that they can “feel their blood”, but in most cases, high blood pressure is a “silent killer”. Specifically, people say they have a headache that they think is due to their pressure, and they can feel when the pressure goes up. Basically, anxiety or pain from tension headache [often due to muscle contraction of the scalp] can cause high pressure. Thus, high pressure can be related to stress or pain, but blood pressure usually does not cause headaches [unless the blood vessels are ruptured, this is usually severe and quite dramatic, and a continuation of Mill's headache Not.]