How Would One Reduce The Risk Of Developing Hypertension

Walking For Heart Health

Try walking to stay active. The Heart Foundation has community walking groups all over Australia you can join. Walking for an average of 30 minutes or more a day can:

• Lower our risk of heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes .
• Manage weight, blood pressure and cholesterol.
• Reduce our risk of some cancers.
• Maintain bone density â reducing risk of osteoporosis and fractures.
• Improve balance and coordination â reducing your risk of falls and other injuries.

How Can I Prevent High Blood Pressure

You can help prevent high blood pressure by having a healthy lifestyle. This means:

If you already have high blood pressure, it is important to prevent it from getting worse or causing complications. You should get regular medical care and follow your prescribed treatment plan. Your plan will include healthy lifestyle habit recommendations and possibly medicines.

NIH: National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute

How Can I Be More Active

• Check first with your healthcare provider before increasing your physical activity. Ask your provider what type and amount of exercise is right for you.
• Choose aerobic activities such as walking, biking or swimming.
• Start slowly and increase activity gradually. Aim for a regular routine of activity five times a week for 30 to 45 minutes each session.

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Multilevel And Population Health Interventions To Improve Bp Control

The pursuit of detecting and improving BP control has uncovered multifactorial barriers, including cultural norms, insufficient attention to health education by health care practitioners, lack of reimbursement for health education services, lack of access to sites to engage in physical activity, larger servings of food in restaurants, lack of availability of healthy food choices in many schools, worksites, and restaurants, lack of exercise programs in schools, large amounts of sodium added to foods during processing and preparation in fast-food and sit-down restaurants, and higher cost of food products that are lower in sodium and calorie content . These challenges to prevention, detection, awareness, and management of hypertension will require a multipronged approach directed not only to high-risk populations, but also to communities, schools, worksites, and the food industry.

Try Meditation Or Yoga

Mindfulness and meditation, including transcendental meditation, have long been used and studied as methods to reduce stress.

Yoga, which commonly involves breathing control, posture, and meditation techniques, can also be effective in reducing stress and blood pressure.

A 2013 review on yoga and blood pressure found an average blood pressure decrease of 3.62 mm Hg diastolic and 4.17 mm Hg systolic when compared with those who didnt exercise.

Studies of yoga practices that included breath control, postures, and meditation were nearly twice as effective as yoga practices that didnt include all three of these elements .

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The Chronic Care Model

Schematic Illustration of the CCM, Including Multilevel Interventions to Prevent and Control Hypertension.

Adapted with permission from Wagner . CCM = chronic care model HT = hypertension.

Team-based care

Team-based care incorporates a multidisciplinary team, centered on the patient, to optimize the quality of hypertension care and includes the patient, the primary care clinician, and other professionals such as nurses, pharmacists, physician assistants, dieticians, social workers, and community health workers, each with predefined responsibilities in care . These professionals complement the primary care clinician by providing process support and sharing the responsibilities of hypertension care. When the primary care provider can delegate routine matters to the team, more time is available to manage complex and critical patient-care problems. A recent systematic review and meta-analysis of 100 randomized trials determined that team-based care, involving medication titration by either nonphysicians or physicians, is highly effective compared with other implementation strategies for BP control in hypertensive patients .

Community involvement

Health care policy

Examples of multilevel interventions for hypertension

What Should I Do If I Have High Blood Pressure

If your healthcare provider has diagnosed you with high blood pressure, they will talk with you about your recommended blood pressure target or goal. They may suggest that you:

• Check your blood pressure regularly with a home blood pressure monitor. These are automated electronic monitors and are available at most pharmacies or online.
• Quit smoking and/or using tobacco products.
• Work on controlling anger and managing stress.

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Gender Age And Cardiovascular Disease Risk

Generally, men have a higher risk than women of developing CVD in middle age. The risk rises as they get older.

However, the risk of developing CVD is an important issue for women, especially as they get older. It is not clear why women tend to get CVD at a later age than men, although it is likely that hormonal changes after menopause, combined with changes in their risk factors, play a role.

Despite your gender and age, you can reduce your risk of developing CVD if you follow a healthy lifestyle and take medicines as prescribed by your doctor.

Smoking And Cardiovascular Disease Risk

As well as causing cancer, smoking affects the arteries that supply blood to your heart and other parts of your body. It reduces the amount of oxygen in your blood and damages your artery walls.

Smoking increases your risk of heart attack, stroke and peripheral vascular disease â which can lead to gangrene and limb amputation).

Smoking makes your blood âstickierâ, causing blood cells to clump together. This slows blood flow through your arteries and makes blockages more common. Blockages may cause heart attack and stroke.

Smoking also makes your artery walls sticky, causing them to become clogged with fatty material called plaque or atheroma. Smokers often have cold hands or feet as a result of clogged arteries, which may also lead to serious problems such as gangrene.

If your coronary artery becomes clogged, it can cause angina. If a blood clot forms in the narrowed coronary artery and completely blocks the blood supply to a part of your heart, it can cause a heart attack.

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Know Your Risk For High Blood Pressure

Some medical conditions can raise your risk for high blood pressure, but you can take steps to lower your risk by changing the factors you can control.

Risk factors that can increase your risk of high blood pressure include health conditions, your lifestyle, and your family history.

Some of the risk factors for high blood pressure cannot be controlled, such as your age or family history. But you can take steps to lower your risk by changing the factors you can control.

Prevent High Blood Pressure

Practice healthy living habits, like being physically active, to help prevent high blood pressure.

By living a healthy lifestyle, you can help keep your blood pressure in a healthy range. Preventing high blood pressure, which is also called hypertension, can lower your risk for heart disease and stroke. Practice the following healthy living habits:

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How Can You Reduce Your Risk Of High Blood Pressure

Fortunately, there are certain things you can do to help reduce your risk of developing high blood pressure. These include the following:

• Eat right: A healthy diet is an important step in keeping your blood pressure normal. The DASH diet emphasizes adding fruits, vegetables and whole grains to your diet while reducing the amount of sodium. Since its rich in fruits and vegetables, which are naturally lower in sodium than many other foods, the DASH diet makes it easier to eat less salt and sodium.
• Keep a healthy weight: Going hand-in-hand with a proper diet is keeping a healthy weight. Since being overweight increases your blood pressure, losing excess weight with diet and exercise will help lower your blood pressure to healthier levels.
• Cut down on salt: The recommendation for salt in your diet is to have less than 1,500 milligrams of sodium a day . To prevent hypertension, you should keep your salt intake below this level. Don’t forget that most restaurant foods and many processed and frozen foods contain high levels of salt. Use herbs and spices that do not contain salt in recipes to flavor your food do not add salt at the table.
• Keep active: Even simple physical activities, such as walking, can lower your blood pressure .
• Drinkalcoholin moderation: Having more than one drink a day and two drinks a day can raise blood pressure.

Consider Cutting Back On Caffeine

Caffeine raises your blood pressure, but the effect is temporary.

In a 2017 study, the systolic blood pressure of 18 participants was elevated for 2 hours after they drank 32 ounces of either a caffeinated drink or an energy drink. Blood pressure then dropped more quickly for the participants who drank a caffeinated drink .

Some people may be more sensitive to caffeine than others. If youre caffeine-sensitive, you may want to cut back on your coffee consumption, or try .

Research on caffeine, including its health benefits, is in the news a lot. The choice of whether to cut back depends on many individual factors.

One older study indicated that caffeines effect on raising blood pressure is greater if your blood pressure is already high. This same study, however, called for more research on the subject .

If your blood pressure is very high or doesnt decrease after making these lifestyle changes, your doctor may recommend prescription drugs.

They work and will improve your long-term outcome, especially if you have other risk factors . However, it can take some time to find the right combination of medications.

Talk with your doctor about possible medications and what might work best for you.

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Eat Garlic Or Take Garlic Extract Supplements

Fresh garlic or garlic extract are both widely used to lower blood pressure.

A meta-analysis found that for people with high blood pressure, garlic supplements reduced their systolic blood pressure by up to about 5 mm Hg and reduced their diastolic blood pressure as much as 2.5 mm Hg .

According to a 2009 clinical study, a time-release garlic extract preparation may have a greater effect on blood pressure than regular garlic powder tablets .

Reducing The Risk Of Developing Type 1 Diabetes

Type 1 diabetes is a chronic autoimmune condition characterized by destruction of pancreatic beta cells. The causes are multi-factorial, with both genetic and environmental factors. The exact nature of causative environmental factors continues to be debated. There is a long preclinical period before the onset of overt symptoms, which may be amenable to therapeutic intervention to prevent disease. Immunotherapeutic interventions continue to be the main focus of type 1 diabetes prevention.

A second strategy is to try to halt, at the time of diagnosis, the immune-mediated destruction of beta cells to preserve any residual capacity to produce insulin. Progress in the field has been slow due to safety considerations namely, side effects from immunosuppression/modulation must be minimized before consideration can be given for clinical use, especially because of the reasonable life expectancy of people with type 1 diabetes and technological advancements with insulin replacement therapy.

As safe and effective preventive therapies for type 1 diabetes have not yet been identified, any attempts to prevent type 1 diabetes should be undertaken only within the confines of formal research protocols.

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Keep Yourself At A Healthy Weight

Having overweight or obesity increases your risk for high blood pressure. To determine whether your weight is in a healthy range, doctors often calculate your body mass index . If you know your weight and height, you can calculate your BMI at CDCs Assessing Your Weight website. Doctors sometimes also use waist and hip measurements to assess body fat.

Talk with your health care team about ways to reach a healthy weight, including choosing healthy foods and getting regular physical activity.

The Top 10 Risk Factors For High Blood Pressure Include:

Being overweight or obese

The more you weigh the more blood flow you need to supply oxygen and nutrients to your tissues. As the volume of blood circulated through your blood vessels increases, so does the pressure inside your arteries.

Too much salt in your diet

Too much sodium in your diet can cause your body to retain fluid, and also causes the arteries in your body to constrict. Both factors increase blood pressure.

Too little potassium in your diet

Potassium helps balance the amount of sodium in your cells. Potassium causes the smooth muscle cells in your arteries to relax, which lowers blood pressure.

Not being physically active

Exercise increases blood flow through all arteries of the body, which leads to release of natural hormones and cytokines that relax blood vessels, which in turn lowers blood pressure. Lack of physical activity also increases the risk of being overweight.

Drinking too much alcohol

Having more than two drinks per day can cause hypertension, probably by activating your adrenergic nervous system, causing constriction of blood vessels and simultaneous increase in blood flow and heart rate.

Stress

High levels of stress can lead to a temporary, but dramatic, increase in blood pressure. If you try to relax by eating more, using tobacco or drinking alcohol, you may only exacerbate problems with high blood pressure.Relaxation and meditation techniques effectively lower blood pressure.

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The Causes And Dangers Of High Blood Pressure

Imagine having a condition that could put you in great danger. It can wreak havoc on your health, but you dont know when it will finally strike. It could be years from now. Even worse, for the majority of the time that you have it, its practically symptomless and silent. Chances are high you dont even know you have it unless you happen to go to the doctor. Does that sound like every hypochondriacs worst nightmare?

It may seem like the set-up to some thriller about a new disease, but what were talking about is high blood pressure or hypertension. High blood pressure is, unfortunately, very common. Its believed that about 1 in 3 adults in the United States is living with hypertension. Only around half of those people have their condition under control. Its important to understand what hypertension is, how its caused, and what the dangers are of living with it for years on end. Here is what you need to know about hypertension.

What is hypertension?

Our cardiovascular systems do a lot of work each and every day. While we may take it for granted, we have to take care of it. Our blood pressure is the force of the blood pushing against the walls of the arteries that carry our blood away from the heart and into the rest of our bodies. Normally, this pressure shouldnt cause harm. However, when you have high blood pressure, the blood pumping too hard can actually cause damage to the arteries and the heart. Years of this can lead to significant health problems.

Following A Healthy Diet

People with diabetes and hypertension can ask their doctor for information and advice on an appropriate diet plan.

Doctors often recommend the for managing blood pressure and overall well-being. This typically includes:

• eating plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables
• focusing on high fiber foods, including whole grains
• limiting added salt and sugar
• avoiding or limiting unhealthy fats, such as trans fats and animal fats

A person with diabetes will need to monitor their intake of carbohydrates and check their blood glucose levels to ensure that their blood glucose remains within the healthy range.

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What Diet Helps Control High Blood Pressure

• Eat foods that are lower in fat, salt and calories, such as skim or 1% milk, fresh vegetables and fruits, and whole-grain rice and pasta.
• Use flavorings, spices and herbs to make foods tasty without using salt. The optimal recommendation for salt in your diet is to have less than 1,500 milligrams of sodium a day. Don’t forget that most restaurant foods and many processed and frozen foods contain high levels of salt. Use herbs and spices that do not contain salt in recipes to flavor your food. Dont add salt at the table.
• Avoid or cut down on foods high in fat or salt, such as butter and margarine, regular salad dressings, fatty meats, whole milk dairy products, fried foods, processed foods or fast foods and salted snacks.
• Ask your provider if you should increase potassium in your diet. Discuss the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension diet with your provider. The DASH diet emphasizes adding fruits, vegetables and whole grains to your diet while reducing the amount of sodium. Since its rich in fruits and vegetables, which are naturally lower in sodium than many other foods, the DASH diet makes it easier to eat less salt and sodium.

Fighting Back Against The Silent Killer

High blood pressure is a symptomless silent killer that quietly damages blood vessels and leads to serious health problems.

While there is no cure, using medications as prescribed and making lifestyle changes can enhance your quality of life and reduce your risk of heart disease, stroke, kidney disease and more.

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Healthy Eating And Cardiovascular Disease Risk

Eating a variety of foods is good for our health and can help reduce the risk of disease, including heart disease. This helps maintain a healthy and interesting diet and provides a range of different nutrients to the body.

To reduce your heart disease risk, follow these heart healthy eating patterns recommended by the Heart Foundation:

• Make your bones and muscles stronger.
• Make you feel more confident, happy and relaxed.
• Help you to sleep better.

If you have had a heart attack, regular physical activity will help you to recover more quickly. If you have diabetes, it will also help you to manage your blood-glucose levels.

Physical activity doesnât have to be strenuous. Moderate-intensity physical activity, such as brisk walking, is great for your health. It is recommended that you do 30â45 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity on most, if not all, days of the week. You can do this in smaller bouts, such as three 10-minute walks, if it is easier.