High blood pressure affects millions of Americans. These individuals have to deal with many of the problems that can occur because of this disease. High blood pressure makes the heart pump blood throughout the body faster than normal. This is dangerous because it forces the heart to work harder than it should. It also causes the arteries to harden.
Even today, the exact triggers for hypertension are not one hundred percent known. However, there are many common factors that are believed to contribute to the disease. These include smoking cigarettes, being overweight or morbidly obese, a lack of physical activity or exercise, having too much sodium in your diet, consuming too much alcohol, high levels of stress, old age, a history of kidney disease, and having family members with hypertension.
Even today, the exact triggers for hypertension are not one hundred percent known. However, there are many common factors that are believed to contribute to the disease. These include smoking cigarettes, being overweight or morbidly obese, a lack of physical activity or exercise, having too much sodium in your diet, consuming too much alcohol, high levels of stress, old age, a history of kidney disease, and having family members with hypertension.
There are two types of elevated pressure of the blood - essential and secondary.
Most individuals in the United States suffer from what is known as essential hypertension. Medical literature usually defines this as having blood pressure that is consistently higher than the average but that cannot be explained by a single cause.
What makes the underlying cause so difficult to pinpoint precisely is that most individuals who are diagnosed with this condition will actually have several risk factors that contribute to their problem.
What we do know is that high blood pressure tends to run in families. Genetic tests have also shown that men are more likely than women to suffer from hypertension. Men whose father and grandfather had high pressure are more likely to have essential hypertension. African American males are the highest risk group for hypertension.
We also know that sodium is an important component of high blood pressure. We know this because the degree of essential hypertension usually lessens when individuals decrease the amount of salt in their diet. This is particularly true for salt sensitive patients where any amount of sodium that is above what their body needs to function can cause their pressure to rise.
Secondary hypertension affects a much smaller part of the population - probably less than six percent overall. It is normally diagnosed when it can be linked to a specific medical condition. For example, there is a direct correlation between developing kidney disease and developing high blood pressure. The same is true for anyone afflicted with Cushing's disease. In these cases, when the underlying cause of the primary disease can be successfully treated, the hypertension will go away as well.
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