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How To Lower Blood Pressure Effectively? A person is said to have hypertension (or most commonly known as high blood pressure) when his or her blood pressure is consistently 140/90 mmHg or above. People who are likely to develop hypertension are those who are obese, smokers, eat too much salt, drink lots of alcohol, have diabetes or family history of high blood pressure. Hypertension can also be due to chronic kidney disease, medications, pregnancy or narrowed artery that supplies blood to the kidney. Uncontrolled hypertension can lead to many other chronic medical conditions including heart disease, stroke, kidney disease, vision loss, metabolic syndrome, and trouble with memory or understanding. Around the world, over 7 million premature deaths result from hypertension through stroke and heart disease. Since there are no symptoms most of the time, people who are hypertensive can develop high blood pressure without even knowing it until they get heart disease and kidney problems. Therefore, it is important for people to have their blood pressure checked during the yearly check-up even if they are not hypertensive. For people who have high blood pressure, self-monitoring of blood pressure on a regular basis at home, besides at their doctor’s clinic, seem to be an effective way to lower the blood pressure.
After reviewing 52 studies, researchers from Tufts
Medical Center in Boston and their associates suggested that people with
hypertension who regularly monitor their own blood pressure tend to have lower
numbers than those who do not use a home blood pressure monitor. Their findings
were published on August 6, 2013 in journal ‘Annals of Internal Medicine’. Their analysis showed that self-monitoring was most successful for patients with the help of extra resources including online materials or phone calls with health workers. Blood pressure measured at home might be more accurate than that measured at the doctor’s clinic where patients tend to be stress. More blood pressure readings would also help doctors make treatment decisions. Remember this, even a little decline in blood pressure have been tied to a lower risk of dying from heart disease or a stroke. In an earlier study published on May 23, 2013 in the ‘British Medical Journal’ (BMJ), researchers from the University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh Napier University reported that patients with uncontrolled blood pressure can significantly improve their health using a new self-monitoring system called telemonitoring that can be used at home. Each year, due to poor control of blood pressure, there are about 62,000 unnecessary deaths from stroke and heart disease in the United Kingdom. Drugs alone are usually difficult to treat patients with this kind of condition. They could, however, benefit from this portable system that enables them to record and send their own blood pressure readings to doctors in real-time. Doctors and nurses will then check these figures and contact patients, if necessary, to discuss with them their health and treatment. The study showed that patients who used telemonitoring had a larger reduction in their blood pressure than those who did not use it. The self-monitoring system encouraged doctors to prescribe and patients to accept more anti-high blood pressure drugs, according to researchers. Nevertheless, use of telemonitoring had little effect on patients’ lifestyle changes, including weight control and salt consumption. Lasted for 6 months, the trial involved 401 primary care patients aged between 29 and 95 with uncontrolled daytime ambulatory blood pressure. They were divided into 2 groups: one got telemonitoring and the other was given normal blood pressure care through their local GP surgery. It was found that doctors in GP practices and health centers were unwilling to increase treatment because monitoring is insufficient to control hypertension, though effective medications are available. While the researchers believed telemonitoring has the potential to be used in many healthcare settings, they recommended more research should be carried out to see whether blood pressure would be reduced on a period of longer than 6 months and whether it is cost effective.
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