High Blood Pressure - The Silent Killer

Have you heard about the Silent Killer? You can joke responding that you have never watched that TV show, but let's get serious and face it, high blood pressure silently kills thousands of people every year due to the simple fact that this condition has no symptoms at all.

You have been told that symptoms of high blood pressure include headaches, dizziness and blurred vision. This is true for some individuals, although sometimes associated to other disease, before hypertension or developed due to hypertension, the medical term for high blood pressure.

Symptoms of high blood pressure appear when an individual has already developed this condition, including those noted above as many others of the commonly associated to hypertension, although more than symptoms, they are signs that individuals are suffering from uncontrolled high blood pressure.

Under medication, hypertension rarely presents any symptom either. However, the major concern is around elderly people who are more at risk to develop more diseases that younger individuals. The risk to develop high blood pressure also increases with age, as people are getting older.

During a study performed in the 1990s with around 5,300 participants, researchers found significant results from groups categorized in people younger than 60, a group of individuals between 60 to 79, and those age 80 and older. Blood pressure readings and symptoms of high blood pressure were analyzed.

People diagnosed with high blood pressure returned these results: the group younger than 60, 27%, individuals in the group 60-79, 63% and people 80 and older 74%. Considering those individuals with normal blood pressure, the proportion was inverse, younger than 60 were 39%, from 60 to 79, 14%, and only 7% of people 80 and older had normal blood pressure.

Some symptoms of high blood pressure were the result of medication used to control hypertension. It was estimated that 7 out of 10 people with high blood pressure were being treated, but some of them showed side effects. Among the people under hypertension treatment, 60% took only one blood pressure drug, 30% were using 2, and 10% used 3 or more.

Elderly Women 80 and older, particularly black women were in the group with high blood pressure out of control and experiencing more symptoms of high blood pressure due to the lack of treatment. Apart from them, 32% of all the participants got their hypertension under control, progressing from high blood pressure to normal levels.